


The Lightest Way

by More_night



Series: The Incredulity of Saint Thomas [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Abstract Love Declarations, Attempt at True to Character, Beakful Kiss, Canon Compliant, Cuddling, Dialogue-centric, Eternal Burn, Fragmented Narrative, Gen, Hallucinations, Kissing, M/M, Metaphysical Negociations of Feelings, Minor Touching, More of the Same, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Post-Season/Series 03, Propositions, Result Is A Showdown of Sad, Season/Series 01, Season/Series 02, Sharing Straws, Then Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-02
Updated: 2015-12-10
Packaged: 2018-04-29 12:38:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 13
Words: 34,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5127935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/More_night/pseuds/More_night
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Throughout all three seasons and after, moments in which Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter discuss things that pertain or relate to sexuality and intimacy, in general and in particular, including or excluding murder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1.

**Author's Note:**

> Parts in italics are excerpts from mental space, memories (altered or not), dreams, nightmares and wishes, etc.
> 
> This fic stemmed from a much broader post-season 3 thing. I wanted to keep said thing plot-centric and eventually the romance-definition parts started to bother me. So I took them all out and put them in chronological order - and this story is the result. The larger plot is evoked in some places, but I think it works. Post-season 3 stuff is in chapters 5 to 13.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will talks about murderous pairs with Freddie Lounds, then with Hannibal Lecter.
> 
> Takes place in early season one.

There were only three other guests in the small bar when Will Graham walked in. He took in the light coming in through the tiny windowpanes. With the dark brown patches of the table tops and the faint sparkling hue of the clear green tiles lining the walls, the room felt natural and bare, a peaceful forest of order and used furniture.

He sat down at the bar, ordered a whisky and opened the file. The young woman was in a leather armchair, in front of her three computer screens. Music was still playing when the police had found her. Her hands and feet had been removed, placed on the shelves above the computers, facing her. She had died from the blood loss, but they had used methamphetamines on her to heighten the pain. Her face still showed traces of shock. _The notes filled the room and there was only darkness except for the eerie light coming from the screens. They took the feet first, smashed one of them, but after cutting it, not before. The cloth they had stuffed in her mouth was soaked with saliva and blood and it smelled wonderful when she urinated on herself, on her chair, trembling and laughing from the meth._

The door’s bell jingled and Freddie Lounds came in. Will saw her at the outer edge of his vision and pushed his glasses back on his nose. Her footsteps were slow and stalking.

“Drinking on duty, Agent Graham?”

Will thought of saying that it was what Special Agent stood for. “For someone who insists on pointing out people’s apparent propensity to aggressivity, you have quite the hostile body language,” he said, finally, as she sat down two seats away and ordered.

“For someone who insists he’s not a killer, you are remarkably susceptible when others call out that possibility in you.”

“Specifically when it’s you doing it, Freddie. You could say it’s personal.” He had closed the file and tracked her eyes moving to it. “You want some of those, right?”

She offered him a wide smile. “How would I say? I’ll buy you a round?”

“I wasn’t planning to drink more, thank you.”

She reached into her purse to turn on her recorder. Graham looked down at it over the top of his glasses and, acidly stricken, she chose a straight question instead. “True or false? Two sets of fingerprints found in the room.”

“No comment.”

“Two sets of wounds on the body?”

Graham said nothing and stared ahead.

“One of them doing it while the other watched?”

He drained his glass.

“It’ll be a nice story, actually,” she mused.

He sneered. “Isn’t it always, with you? You like your fairy tales.”

“Two killers is better. Relationships are better. Easier to identify with.”

“And because, then, you can add sexual innuendos to the list of degradations.”

“Why not? Sex sells, they say. Sex and murder all the more.”

Will looked up. Behind the bar, in the mirror partly obscured by rows of glimmering bottles, was his face, searching his own eyes. Lounds found them. “Perversity is always appealing,” he reflected.

“It’s got to be vain, really. Being Will Graham.”

“Is that what you see, Freddie? Vanity?”

“You can’t actually do a certain work and not like part of it.” She sipped from her drink, a tall glass with a mix of orange and pink liquids, with ice and cherries. “So what part do you like best?”

“If I’m vain, you’re obscene.”

“Is that what you see in me? Obscenity?”

“I’m sure you’ve been called worse.”

“I have.” She paused, the green tones of the light catching in her deep auburn hair. “I guess there isn’t much difference between obscenity and truth.”

“People who read you don’t want the truth. They want the sordid and the foul,” Will started recounting, absorbed. “These people who kill other people, what do they eat, where do they go, do they sleep well, do they have sex. What kind of sex, the creepy kind or the vanilla kind. Probably the creepy kind. Do they brush their teeth, do they cook their food or order some lousy take-out. Do they walk the street like every one of us, or do they stay home and contemplate doom all day.”

Lounds drank his swift words. “It is tricky, isn’t it? But you seem to get the hang of it.”

“That doesn’t explain anything,” Will retorted. “It never does.”

“It works for people who aren’t murderers. For my readers,” she jibed. “A little gossip is always good.”

“Those lives aren’t yours. Those deaths aren’t yours to profit from. Killing shouldn’t be this casual.”

From the delight on her face, he is confirmed: his tone had been sinister. “No. Because you like your murders beautiful and pure, don’t you?”

“Beautiful. Pure. Your choice of words is… engaging.”

She licked her lips. “I’m just adding flesh to death.”

“Death is never pure. If it’s anything, it’s ugliness, organized in a catastrophic fashion. You exalt them by making them relatable.”

Clear daylight interrupted them. Beverly Katz stood in the doorway, cut in darkness against the flooding whiteness of the outside. “Will?” Beverly called out.

He slid down from the bar stool and left Freddie Lounds on her own.

Once they were out, Beverly said, “You know she likes you, right?”

“Oh, she does,” he said. “The good guy with the weird, dark talent. It’s the perfect mix of danger, gothic fantasy and suspense she’s looking for. I’m just a narrative tool, a figure of speech in her uncanny discourse.”

Beverly said nothing and flashed a conniving if uneasy grin. She was about to squeeze his arm and Will would perhaps have shifted slightly at the touch. But Zeller waved at her from the end of the parking lot where the FBI vans were parked. She slipped into the cordonned-off area and jogged their way, passing Hannibal Lecter, who was approaching Will, circumspect.

Will looked upward at the tall, brick-walled building facing them. They had found the body in an apartment on the eighteenth floor. Anonymous tip. The phone call was being traced. There was too much people here and he felt useless. The evidence was knotted together, he needed a clear head, some space. To lay the pictures out on his desk and stare at them until they glowed faintly in the slippery innards of his mind.

“Was Miss Lounds curious of the present case?” Hannibal asked.

He nodded coolly and fondled the aspirin bottle in his coat pocket. “She wanted info about the two sets of fingerprints.”

Dr. Lecter’s breath formed clean puffs of mist in the air as they made their way back to the vans. “Confirming two killers, she can postulate and evoke the deviant character of their relationship.”

“Her cleverness only fuels her need to bleed death dry until it can stand in big, bold letters on her website.”

In the distance, Jack Crawford paced near the forensics van, hands in pockets, rigid, globally displeased. Hannibal’s eyes attached to him, then returned to Will. “Beyond complicity, relationship suggests that murder is shared and desired. She will pass it for a coital substitute,” he said.

Will scoffed, both amused and bitter, slipping his gloves on. “Probably not in words so blunt. She likes a dreadful punchline.”

Hannibal cracked a humorless smile, a snowflake catching on the collar of his wool coat. “What then? Would she simply say they were in love?” he offered, derision neatly wrapped in politeness.

Jack was gesturing their way now. Will turned around and spotted Freddie Lounds, who was chatting with two local policemen on watch near the street corner. “A romantic view,” Will conceded. Hannibal smirked quietly as they walked side by side, in step. “But not one she would adopt, I think. And not exactly true either… Getting in someone else’s intimacy, it’s always frightful, to some degree. Murder or not.”

“Always?”

“Yeah.” Will looked up at the tiny window on the eighteenth floor. It was broken and a FBI agent inspected something on the railing of the emergency stairs outside it. The sun blinded Will. _He saw them both then, but could not entirely adjust his perspective yet. They remained fuzzy_ and he stayed where he was, in the cold, in the parking lot. The concrete swayed again under his feet. _One of them got the saw and the other stared, enraptured. Then Will was the one who observed, and then he was the one who administered, but the truth of their violence was in the community of it,_ and he could not stand in the middle, because he could never both share and remain himself for long enough.


	2. 2.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will tries to think about something else than the case at hand and only partially succeeds. 
> 
> Set in season one. Could be anywhere between Oeuf (1x04) and Trou Normand (1x09).

His steps were muffled by the carpet and the discreet smell of lavender reached his nose. He was almost twenty minutes early. It was only after sitting down that he noticed the talking voices coming from behind the closed door of Hannibal’s office. One voice, in fact. It was not Hannibal’s, and it was not particularly loud, but it had a specific tone, so that Will could make out some of the vowels, and, occasionally, complete sounds. Another patient, no doubt. 

Given the silence in the waiting room, soon he did not need to concentrate to understand some words. Gradually, his ear grew used to the subdued noises and he could not block them out at all anymore. Even without Hannibal’s replies, the conversation took shape distinctly. Will stifled a sigh, slipped his fingers over his closed eyelids under his glasses.

Trying to fix his mind elsewhere, he pulled out the file from his bag and flipped through the pictures again. The killer had used several kinds of rope, as if to try them out. Some of them had marked the skin. Some of them had attached to it. The bruises looked messier than most, capillaries burst from pressure. Price and Zeller thought the killer was trying out some different kinds of cable, to find out which one was his favorite. Will had thought that there might have been a ritual part involved, because the patterns in the neck seemed staged, or layered, as if created for their ornamental quality. But it could just be display as well.

He had pulled other strangulation files to compare the markings and he was taken _in contemplating a series of hematomas, contrasting their sizes, letting the bloated skins mingle in his mind with the taut ones, and the pale ones, and the dried up, long-dead ones in a large blur that began to imbibe him_ , when another voice came up.

“Lost in thought?”

Will looked up and Hannibal stood before him, holding the door open courteously.

Forming a wary smile that was half an explanation, the other half an apology, Will put the file away and rose. “I thought your door was soundproof,” he said, as he passed Hannibal on his way in.

“It is. His voice has a particular timbre,” Hannibal said, moving to his desk, leaning over it to place two notebooks in a neat pile, with a book over them, in the center. “My apologies. He's not usually scheduled before your appointment.”

Will set his bag down and placed his coat on the arm of the chair where he would sit. “Does he always talk about sex?”

“Some patients are partial to specific topics of conversation. Sometimes, they’re important to them and, moderately so, for their therapy.”

“Closeted?” Will sat down and felt the other man’s warmth still permeating the chair. He rubbed his knees nervously and got back to his feet.

“Not necessarily. Overpowered.”

“It’s good I don’t do your job. I’m not sure I could manage a whole hour of this.”

“Years of training, Will. Goodwill to assist and heal. Resistance to monotony. Adaptation to the proper vocabulary. Consideration for the possibility of future erudite gossip among colleagues.”

“In anonymous form, I hope,” Will pointed out, eyebrows arched.

Hannibal blinked in silent assent, one corner of his mouth straightening.

Pacing the room, Will moved to stand behind his chair and leaned down over it. “If he wants to stop having this kind of dreams, staring at pictures of dead people all day long pretty much gets sex out of your head.”

“Or it mixes death with something else,” Hannibal remarked. “Your dreams. They have no erotic component at all?”

Will shrugged, the forts went up and he remained informational. “Rarely. Indistinctly. But I haven’t had an authentic sexual fantasy in probably 10 years,” he said. “Is it bad?”

Hannibal unbutonned his jacket and settled down in his chair, adjusting the notebook on the glass table beside him. “It’s somewhat unusual,” he offered. “Please sit down.”

“The seat is warm,” Will explained.

“He grows agitated sometimes.”

Will moved around the chair to sit down, but it still did not feel entirely like his own, although the leather had indeed cooled down. “Warn me if I ever get to be this...” He searched for a word.

“Dull?”

“Forsaken,” Will preferred.

Hannibal gave a minimal, but trusting smile. “I’ll make sure of it.”

“But then, I guess I’m not a garden variety anything, am I?” He placed his hands on both arms of the chair. “Why did you never ask me the sex questions?”

“They’re not a requirement. Did all psychiatrists you met before ask them?”

“Eventually, everyone makes sure it’s on topic.” _The worn couch was faded turquoise velvet. Excitement vanishing and becoming something else entirely. Only a strenght. Events started mechanically unfolding. The distinct feeling that it was why some people thought this had nothing to do with will in many cases. The hurry and the definite knowledge of the rest of the drunken attendees in the next room, loud, like a signaling light at the edge of his visual field._

 _And his mind unable to pick up exactly what it was in her, specifically. Half of it seemed desire, the rest, Will was not sure. Proving. Insisting. Fearing. He drew back. She followed him, giggling. His head deep in the cushions. The heaviness. They both tasted like cigarettes and beer. His hands on her breasts, the bra twisted up, and the world changed and became presence and matter. She snuggled against him, they brushed and pushed. More ash, more saliva. More ash._ Will blinked as the feelings surged brightly in the periphery of his mind, then faded.

Hannibal crossed his legs and leaned back slightly in the seat. “I think you would perceive them to be a threat. You are protective of the intimacy you manage to keep in your mind. I see no reason to test the integrity of your defense mechanisms, beyond what you volunteer. Besides, we have touched deeper subjects.”

“Sexuality isn’t deep?”

“It can be. It doesn’t have to. What drives us to obtain sexual satisfaction lies deeper than the act itself.”

Will smirked. “Isn’t it the other way around?”

It was Hannibal’s turn to give a minor smile. “Only if you’re a classical freudian.”

“And you’re not a classical anything, Dr. Lecter,” Will stated, eyes moving from the floor to the man facing him.

Hannibal tilted his head, partly in acknowledgment, partly in curiosity. “Would you truly prefer dreams that are sexual in content?”

“It would feel,” Will searched for a neutral word and found none, “normal.” Again, in this office, he felt defenseless, but not attacked. He wondered dimly whether Dr. Lecter proceeded like this with all of his patients: show them he knew everything, then show them he would not do anything about it. Obtaining power, but not using it. Embodying it the same way a black hole embodied light.

Smoothing his pant leg, the psychiatrist countered casually. “One could argue it depends on the dream.”

“Dreaming about death, dead bodies, ways to die, death instruments somehow makes dreaming about vorarephilia fairly banal.”

“Or exotic. To each the discomforts of their own mind,” Hannibal corrected. “How would you enjoy that kind of dream?”

Will got up from his chair, feeling the other man in there again. “You’re usually more subtle.”

“One could argue you brought it up.”

Going to the window, Will stared outside through the translucent blinds. Grey sky and setting sun, a quiet burst of deep yellows under a swollen cloud. He brought his hand to his eyes, trying to choose the words accurately and to take _the feeling of another person’s neck under his hands_ out of his mind. “Empathy trains the mind to resist truths about itself,” he started. “And it can just as well make you blind to what people expect of you.”

“How so?”

“It’s… If I don’t concentrate enough, I can absorb another’s feelings, like a sponge. I don’t know exactly how much of the feelings I feel are my own. In the act.”

“You desire as you are desired?”

“Not literally,” Will said. “But I could let it happen.”

“Would you?”

“I’m not enough of a narcissist,” Will said, walking back toward his seat to stand behind it, arms crossed.

“Yet, you feel that your empathy coheres you, even if it may be a burden on occasions,” the psychiatrist said, eyes above Will, to the rows of books on the upper level of the room, fingers laced in his lap, looking placid, but something else. Demonstratively noncommittal was the only thing that came to Will’s mind. “Is sex an enjoyable occasion?”

“Sometimes,” Will said. “Some rare times. Usually, it ends up being weird. I tried explaining it, but it’s hard to explain. I tried not to, but it’s even weirder.” Will eyed Hannibal for a time, able to pin down his impression better, finally. He was being shown the common psychiatrist impersonation, more patently than usual. “Sex is meant to be selfish. Love is meant to be selfless. And I don’t do so good at being selfish, I always feel like I’m not exactly myself. Then I’m good at being selfless, but that’s eventually a problem,” he went on, quietly, expecting Hannibal to pick up on the abstract wording. He did not.

“Do you resent the isolation?”

Will pointed his thumbs outward against his crossed arms. “No. I’m fine with it,” he said. He came back to sit. “So, how weird am I?”

Hannibal smiled. Reassuring, but not flagrantly so. “It’s not uncommon for people to prefer solitude to perilous romantic or sexual involvements.”

Staring at his knees for a time, Will felt his mind flutter again. This time, _it focused on the face of the person he would be strangling, right above the neck. He assumed he would find himself absorbed in the junction between neck and face, the region where the skin dipped inward and was particularly soft, under the jawbone. He would probably sink his thumbs under it, just to see how far they could go. And his hands, he kept thinking, how could he fit them to the neck, a neck was so large, when one came to think of it._ He placed his hands on his thighs, where they would feel the warmth of the skin through his pants. “I’d like to get married,” he said, reaching for the simplest thought of them all. “I think I would like that.”

Adjusting his stance in his seat, Hannibal ran his fingers along a seam in the leather, noticing the end of a thread minutely sticking out. “We all seek companionship,” he said, absently.

“I don’t know if I’m someone someone can be with.”

“It’s not impossible for someone to understand you.”

Tilting his head, Will knew he seemed to look through rather than look at as his eyes stayed on Hannibal. “Are you referring to yourself?”

A delicate smile on, Hannibal did not shift. “In the context of this conversation, it would be grossly unprofessional. Do you believe I would?”

For some time, Will took the time to think it over, looking intently at the psychiatrist opposite him, up and down, examining the whole of his body language, past and present. “No,” he said, ultimately. “I don’t pick that up from you.”

“It must be disturbing to detect attraction as intensely as you can. Do you apprehend it as aggression?”

Will shook his head. “Most of the time, people are wrong about what they want. They feel an amalgam of emotions, they file it under attraction, or love, or lust. It’s all kind of clumsy and jumbled.”

“Whereas you embrace the mixture?”

“It embraces me, Doctor.” Eyes elsewhere again. In the upper corner of the room, a ray of sunlight hit a bookshelf. It was _the exact same shade of brown the pooled blood had under the third strangled victim._ Will winced and summoned another memory, forcing himself to stay on this topic to avoid the other haunting one, just for a few moments. “There was a student last semester. He waited until the grades were in to talk to me.” He recalled the student’s face now. It was shaded. Came with it his own crippling embarrassment. “He didn’t know what he wanted exactly, didn’t know me, didn’t know himself. It was all so messy, it was as if his own desires were obscure, everything in it was dark and confused.”

“I was under the impression you would favor a heterosexual model.”

_Will saw him when he closed the classroom’s lights and headed out. The student was about his size, but with a sweatshirt, nice boots, broader chest. He inspected the ground, waiting for him. Looking over his shoulder, Will knew what was about to happen. He could not go the opposite way, there was no exit through the other end of the corridor. The student was from last semester’s class, they must have received their transcripts a couple of days ago. He was either happy with his mark or not, and Will hoped it was the second one, not expecting to enjoy the empty socialization that came with praises and thanks._

_But as he circled the young man, deliberately too distant to engage in conversation, he noticed a change in bearing that pointed to something else entirely, something diffuse and particularly, comically nervous in the stance._

_And the student started speaking and Will listened, unable to deflect the agitation and so many other emotions and so bundled up they were on the verge of putrefaction, their parts indistinguishable. The student finished by asking if Will would like to get a cup of coffee, or something, or anything._

_Will’s face went for a anxious grin, but it came out as a smirk. He refused as politely as he could. The student mumbled an apology: “Sorry. You’re not like that.”_

_“No. It’s not… I… I don’t know you.” Will stepped back further, if it was possible. His back would soon hit the wall. “It’s not personal.”_

“I do favor it.” Will shrugged tensely, willing the memory away. “These things, of whatever kind and type, just happen to me.”

“You don’t feel like an active participant?”

“I tend to cherish the occasions I have for closeness,” Will rephrased.

Hannibal rose from his seat, went to his desk and sat down, opening a notebook, checking, closing it again. “Are you currently attracted to someone?”

“Yes.” Will was wandering again, from the window to the seat and back, but it failed to settle his thoughts. _He would have left, but he moved closer to the student and things turned into crystal and stillness as Will wrapped his hand around his throat, closing and closing. The younger man did not defend himself and Will pushed him back against the wall behind him, the hands hanging limply down now. When the choking sounds stopped, the skin had taken a thick, reddened tone, it seemed compressed. The body slid down and Will crouched beside it, pulling the scarf down to get a better look at the marks on the neck._

“Female?”

“Yes.” Will brought his hands to his face. He tried to stop _Alana Bloom’s face from replacing the student’s own_ in his mind and failed. Hannibal had fallen silent, waiting. “Don’t push it,” Will added.

“I didn’t intend to. Are you hopeful regarding the matter?”

Will scoffed softly. “Desire is a kind of hope in itself, isn’t it?”

“If it is genuine.”

It sank in. Will countered. “What about you?”

Hannibal did not look up from the book he was consulting, uninvolved. Usual question, Will figured. “It is better for therapists not to think of themselves as sexual while in therapy.”

 _He was strangling someone again and it was Hannibal Lecter. Will was not as tall, but much stronger in his vision and even as he got out of it, he could not stop thinking about his fingers, rigid, stiff and clawing, it seemed,_ where they were, burried in his pockets. He swallowed. “You didn’t write anything down,” he noted, eyeing the notebook that lay untouched on the table beside Hannibal’s empty chair.

“I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to what brings you here.”

Finally able to fit words to his perception, Will found that Hannibal was entirely incurious about their conversation, courteous but walled-off, which he found at the same time both strange and fitting. Will’s hands still ached in his pocket, the muscles still working, _the images of necks and necks, so many, tiny necks, crowding_ his mind. Dr. Lecter transcribed notes and Will paced around a while longer. Eventually, he gave in, hoping the discussion would cleanse him from the images. “If you had to strangle someone, how would you do it?” he asked.

The psychiatrist cocked his head. “I assume hands are excluded?” Hannibal said.

Massaging his temples, Will went to his bag. “Yes. We’re searching for a kind of rope. He used more than a handful of them. I can’t figure out why.”

He spread the pictures out on Hannibal’s desk, the darkness of the bruises both contrasting and reflecting the deep, solid wood. “One would need something firm, of course, flexible – unless they plan to crush the trachea?” Hannibal started.

“There was a lot of bruising, but the cartilage was okay.” Will let his fingers skip over the pictures, trying to _piece them together inside and again they dispersed like birds taking off in a clouded winter sky_.

Hannibal leaned over the desk and stared attentively. “It would have to be thin enough, not slippery, easy to fasten.” Another tilt of his head. “It depends on the setting. In a professional context, he could have selected the rope in advance based on his liking, or on any other criteria. In the limits of, say, the household, electric cable could be a practical option.”

“Some was used,” Will echoed. “Belt, hairband and shoelaces too.” He slid his hands on the lower half of his face and the truth _felt so close, he thought he could perhaps slid his fingers around his own throat._ But Hannibal was there with him, examining the pictures. “It’s so messy,” he said, finally.

“Different markings on each bodies?” Hannibal suggested, more inquisitive now, bearing back to a colder stance, the one Will found he prefererd, less considerate, less gently manipulative. Now there was something between them again – wounds, rotting skin, barren eyes, extinct minds.

“No. No pattern,” Will shot down the thought. And it hit him, suddenly. He brought his hands up before him and Hannibal stared at them, then at Will staring at them, eyes consuming for an instant, then it was gone. “It _is_ his hands,” Will realized, oblivious. “He’s not searching for an effect on the bodies, he’s searching for a feeling in his hands.”

Will’s voice faded for a moment as Hannibal ran two fingers on the picture showing reddened marks, with green and yellow in the middle. And Will and him stood together in a shared darkness and Hannibal was not entirely sure yet if Will really saw darkness or light. Because for Hannibal it was light that the younger man emanated. Eventually, he collected himself and spoke, suggesting to investigate individuals suffering from neuropathy in their extremities.


	3. 3.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal shows Will concrete shreds of the new life planned for them both. 
> 
> Takes place directly at the end of Tome-Wan (2x12).

Will had stayed by the fire for a while, the flames a restful place for the eyes he had expected would hurt, at this point, but did not. Occasionally, he would turn back toward Hannibal and see the drawing progress, the woman standing at the foot of Patroclus’ bed becoming clearer, more shades crowding against the two main figures. Patroclus’ inanimate body was drawn all in whites and lighter lines. The shadows loomed over it and Achilles held them back.

Around nine, Hannibal had done as he had faultlessly done since Will had returned to his office on Thursdays, and had asked if he would join him for dinner. Will had accepted, as usual.

There was _crème brûlée au cassis_ for dessert, with a crispy Riesling. They finished the wine and Hannibal rose smoothly. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to show you,” he said.

He left through the sliding doors and came back moments later with a small metal container, removing Will’s plate swiftly and setting the box in its place. Will flicked it open while Hannibal sat back down and adjusted the cuffs of his shirt.

Inside, there were two passports, one Canadian for Will, one Ukrainian for Hannibal. Will stared at his own face, blank, not alien in any way, just as he would imagine himself. He tried to remember when he had worn this exact shirt the last time, attempting to know when the picture had been taken - and where he was when it had happened.

Hannibal brought their plates to the kitchen and Will splayed the contents of the box out on the table. Birth certificates, driver’s licenses, bank accounts. Other things too, papers with European Union stamps, some written in French, in Italian, one in German. “You were worried about the sustainability of our current situation. I thought it would be best to show you that it is mostly not a dream,” Hannibal explained. “Does it seem clearer now?”

“I think so,” Will tried. He sat back, eyes still fixed on his own, second, new passport, and he felt like he was breaking away, again. The pieces of him that would survive the rupture, he wondered what would become of them.

“In your professional opinion, are they adequate forgeries?” Hannibal asked on, setting two cups of coffee on the table, his voice both casual and grave.

“Well, the passports are awesome,” Will said, examining the leather binding, the paper’s thickness, the print. “There’s none of the telltale signs. Actually, without a microscope and a chem analysis, I’m pretty sure no one could know those are not real.” He sipped from his coffee and hoped he was dreaming and that it would never end, because he did not want to know what was the daylife that generated these dreams.

“They are more real than most things around us,” Hannibal agreed.

Looking up, Will figured he might as well see how far he could push the subject. How much had Hannibal put into this, where did it come from and where would it go. He cleared his voice. “We’ll need a cover. A story. Something,” he started.

Hannibal’s brow tightened and he looked ahead, at the black feathers and the dried violets of the table centerpiece. “Or we change strictly nothing,” he offered. “We are both employed. We both have lives that are not what they seem. We have dinners and conversations.” He picked up a crumb from the table and placed it in the saucer under his cup. “I have a personal preference for Italy, but we can discuss it as we go.”

The smile that formed on his lips caught Will by surprise. “I’ve never seen the Mediterranean.”

It was true and brief, when Hannibal smiled too. “Senses are better than words to approach it. Compared to the experience of it, the description is tame.”

At the moment, things seemed simple. Although they were now not quite clear in all their depths, in their surface, there was light. There was something Will could grasp that reached farther than common friendship and into perfect concord, closing in around them both. “We’d live together, wouldn’t we?”

“Don’t we already, in many ways?” Hannibal mused.

Placing his cup down noiselessly, Will considered the stillness of his own hands, his own breathing, as he said, “Not literally.” He looked up, unwavering, where did this new firmness of his soul come from? “Isn’t there a risk to draw attention, if we stay together?”

“People will see what they want to see in us.” Hannibal held Will’s gaze. “How uncomfortable does it make you feel?” he asked then, being the seemingly meticulous psychiatrist again.

Will’s eyebrows quirked and he placed the papers back carefully in the box. “Why would I be uncomfortable?” 

Hannibal retrieved the container and moved to clean the table of its last remains. “You like your life as you made it, mostly isolated from others,” he said quietly.

“We’re expressly similar in that aspect,” Will stated.

Maybe the wine had got to his head, maybe death had filled his thoughts. It should be sickening and he knew that he had since long been fishing for himself in the obscured waters of a frozen lake. In these waters, he could not be another one than himself and he knew it was wrong.

Will followed Hannibal in the kitchen and watched him make neat piles of dishes on the counter. “Why not splitting?” he asked.

“Because now that we have known companionship, returning to solitude could be perplexing. None of us would find our secluded lives as we left them.” Hot water pooled into the sink, bubbles formed chunky clouds and flimsy patterns. “We can finish the matters at hand here first. Then, we’ll leave it to others to make their… educated guesses,” Hannibal went on, his hands deep in the water.

For a time, Will towelled glasses and porcelain ware, trying to place exactly where his thoughts should sit, finding that they were mostly veiled, uncertain if they were still only feelings, or states, or moods, or only seconds and hazes. “I’m glad this isn’t a dream,” he said, finally. It was true, as everything was.

“Pretense can be exhausting.”

“But this exhaustion can be fought. It has to.”

This late in the evening, some of Hannibal’s hair fell on his forehead and it took the deceptive monster away and left only the friend, who walked with Will in the derelict basements of his mind. Will felt it again, the need to relish this proximity. But then came the horror and the thick, shining lakes of blood that waited just under it. “One cannot pretend at every time. Eventually, the truth appears and it requests that a place be made for it,” Hannibal said, eyes on the dishes, while Will’s eyes were on him.

 

* * *

 

At first, Will knew that things were different because the fire had died down. He blinked a few times: embers cooled in the darkness, parts of the burned wood logs fragmenting in dead greys and shiny, blazing oranges. He must have fallen asleep. He took his hand to his face, feeling for his glasses, not finding them there, suddenly coming to think that he must be home, sleeping in a chair. But the smells here were not the ones of his home: no dogs, no faint dust, no motor oil, nothing he really knew.

Waking up fully, he remembered the effortless silence in which Hannibal and him had finished the dishes. Then they were sitting by the fireplace as Hannibal kept drawing silently, sketchbook on his knee, undisturbed. Will recalled rubbing his eyes and tilting his head back, just to give his eyelids a rest.

He noticed the small lamp Hannibal had left on in the background. A blanket had been placed on Will’s knees, up to his waist, covering his legs. He folded it neatly, then turned the lamp off and was plunged in the faultless and merciful dark. He took his glasses from the coffee table and slipped them in the pocket of his shirt, feeling them against the even and avid beating of his heart.

In the corridor, a beam of moonlight coming from the window allowed him to check his watch: nearly two in the morning. Trying to relax his right shoulder constricted by the stiff nap, he made it upstairs.

On the second floor, a door was opened on his left, soft light coming from inside. Will peered in the guest room: the sombre wooden floor, the pale green bedspread, grey blinds and chairs. He did not walk in and turned to his right. Another door was slightly ajar, a ray of light showing underneath. He pushed it open slowly.

The dark walls inside conveyed peace, everything was inert. There was a change in decoration. Passing the short hall, he took in the samurai armor, the japanese engravings, the piled books, tomorrow’s readied clothing folded on hangers. He found Hannibal sitting in bed, the covers up to his stomach, wearing a dark sweater, reading. He looked up from the page where he had just noted something down.

“Slept well?”

“Yes, thank you,” Will said, throat tied at the sudden intimacy. “I left the blanket downstairs…”

Hannibal nodded once in acknowledgement.

Having moved closer, Will was now half-way to the bed. He slipped his hands in his pockets and looked at the other side of the room, the fireplace, the carpet, the wide mirror. “Educated guesses,” he repeated, testing the ground. He was scared it would give away, or he hoped it would. It would feel more real if there was no floor and no walls and if they were both falling, tangled and eternal.

Hannibal clipped his pen to his current page and closed the _Zeitschrift für Psychologie_ , twining his fingers together on his lap. “The best disguise is to hide not in the costume you craft for yourself, but in the one others craft for you. Whenever they think they see something else in you, they doubt themselves and the thought is often too difficult for them to pursue it.”

“You would know,” Will remarked.

“As would you, hiding in the eyes of others from yourself.”

“No longer hiding.”

“No longer lying, at least.”

Will composed himself and let a few seconds of silence go by. “Achilles and Patroclus were lovers.”

Whether Hannibal was surprised or expectant, neither showed. His face remained peaceful, bearing the openness that it now did, sometimes. “Only according to an array of interpretations that arose in the 5th century before Christ, hundreds of years after their tale was written down. It still persists today, but personally, I think the question to be beside the point,” he expounded.

Will blinked. “Beside the point.”

“Friendship can be as passionate as love. Many deep kinships don’t require sexuality. As you know.” Hannibal ran a hand over the coverlet’s edge. “I also don’t believe you to be so inclined, at the moment,” he added, calmly.

The room throbbed around Will. The constriction in his chest reminded him of childhood’s crucial instants and he was suspended in the air, far away above all this, when he only wished he would land. The impact of his feet on the ground breaking his legs and the rest of the bones crumbling, him becoming dust. He had never been more solidly himself than now that he was broken and, looking at the scattered pieces of his mind around him, he did not even know who that was exactly anymore. “It’s hard to say I’m inclined to anything,” he observed, cautious, discovering the words as they came out of his mouth.

“Losing yourself in a desire that is not yours would be the best way to generate cruelty,” Hannibal said, formal, casting his eyes down to place his journal and pen on the bedside table. He rose from bed. The relaxed clothing look like nakedness on him more than skin would have.

Will had this shifting impression again, not to know whether he faced the most elaborate part of the Hannibal Lecter staged portrayal or its crude absence. “Desires are but a swirling mass of balanced motions and weights,” he evoked.

Around Will, every single object in the room seemed to try and stand apart from the other ones. Hannibal walked to him and stopped one feet away. For a moment, Will was certain one of them was propositioning and he could not tell which one of them it was. He could not let go of Hannibal’s eyes, empty but watchful, as if witnessing a performance they held no interest in but still wanted to see through to the end, _his hand curled around his, while warm water was being poured from the sink into a deep pan, the same he had seen roasts being brought to the table into, Will thought. He muttered that he needed to go back home, see to Buster’s wounds, board up the window. There was so much to do, so much to think of once you had killed someone. Hannibal’s hand was on his arm, smoothing._

_“The memories will want to scatter, Will. Hold on to them,” Hannibal instructed, pulling the cuff of Will’s shirt back to immerse his hand in the lukewarm water._

_Eyes closed, Will saw faces, limbs and motions, disconnected, like the broken machine Randall Tier had hoped to force into himself. “Why is it so tempting to let them go?” he asked._

_“Because you have found a new, unusual force.” Hannibal’s fingers ran a cloth on his wet skin, dislodging blood from cracks, exposing the newborn pink underneath. “Your mind and this force, they are trying to see which one will be pulled apart by the other.”_

_Will tried to say something. The good he felt inside, coming up in sudden bursts, like flames drawn from oil, was only matched by the warmth of Hannibal’s skin against his, Will’s inside pressed to Hannibal’s outside._

_“Make a fist.” Will closed his hand, joints aching. “Tighter,” Hannibal said. Will winced and did so. Then the other man reached forward, rapt, and took his wrist, shifting it, testing the pull in the tendons. His thumb brushed against Will’s in what_ Will could still think, was a form of speculative fixation.

“Authentic ambivalence is one of your most striking traits.” Hannibal looked at a point somewhere below Will’s face, his chest or his neck, as if seeking out his heart. Back to his eyes, then, he went on, “But here, for now, you must choose, Will. You leave this room or you stay. Are you staying?”

The invitation stood in the room, like another body between theirs, making them suddenly very close. All things Will wished to say or do (asking what would happen, consume in this specific closeness, see and touch and knife through the dream or stare it right in the eyes) vacated him when he realized there was one thing he should be thinking about that had never, until this moment, crossed his mind. He could not do this. Yet here he was. The thought of it was not so strange. It would just be playacting, just more of it, right? In the end, he said, “I feel slightly out of focus,” noting how ashen his voice sounded.

Hannibal’s gaze retreated and the man went back to his bed, sitting down. “Then you should go.”

“Thank you for the guest room,” Will said. “But I think I’ll drive home. I’m suddenly wide awake.”

“You’re always welcome here.” The tilt in Hannibal’s head told Will more than the words did.

He went to the guest room, clicked the light shut and walked down the stairs, wondering if, under any other circumstances, he would have considered the offer. No other circumstances presented themselves to him.

 

* * *

 

On a road outside of Baltimore, he slowed down. Once he had pulled on the side, he detached his feet from the pedal and his hands from the wheel. He shut the car down and all lights were out. Plunged in complete darkness, he ran his hands over his face and he felt better. So he was still there, he had not melted down to nothing yet.

Somehow, Will had thought that Hannibal’s persona would never give away. Somewhere, he had hoped that there was nothing behind, or something so ugly, so twisted that it would be unrecognizable. Something whose only appetite was for destruction.

It was already morning when he went to bed. The sun woke in pinks and insubstantial ribbons of clouds. Will dreamed that his house filled with water, _sea water, he realized, when he noticed the taste against his palate. Not only did he not breathe at all, but he felt no asphyxiation either. Nor panic, neither fatigue came. After a while, the water burst the windows of the house open and flooded the grounds outside. His dogs swam with him, alive too. But horror struck him when he realized that he had a body no longer. No limbs, no face, no skin. He passed through a wall. He tried to reach for Winston and his fingers were not there. So he was the water. He had been, all this time._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What Hannibal says about the interpretation of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is true. Commentators, poets and playwrights, starting in the classical period (5th and 4th century B.C.), especially in (or in regions under the influence of) Athens, interpreted their relationship to be sexual in nature, while the text of the _Illiad_ itself is not explicit about it. Given how little we know about the role of sexuality in male friendships in Homer's cultural background (presumably Ionian) and given how little-to-average we know about the social role of homosexuality in classical Greece, it remains a very complex issue in current scholarship (if you're interested in the issue, the wikipedia page on Achilles and Patroclus is pretty thorough). The ambiguity fits the characters well, at this point, though. So, well, even back then, shippers be shipping. Sorry for the short classics geekery fit.
> 
> Also, I was a bit lax with the editing on the last chapter. My apologies. I hope this one was better.


	4. 4.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After his conversation with Bedelia, Will returns to his motel room where his mind plays tricks on him. 
> 
> A missing scene from The Number of the Beast Is 666 (3x12), set directly after the opening sequence where Will and Bedelia talk about the loving and the aching.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for such a late night update. But this slow-paced story just got slower, because a new chapter came up. So I'm posting two chapters tonight to stay on schedule and apologize for the augmented slowness.

The bright lights of the Johns Hopkins Hospital’s entrance covered every object in pale shades and stark tones. Will walked past the front desk, headed for the elevator, down the corridor, kept his head high but his eyes so empty they pushed everything else out. He pressed the button and waited, _words and noises chiming around him._

_The light from the vending machine bathed her face in white and gave her peace, like snow would to an animal corpse. Molly’s shirt was drenched with blood. The entry point was invisible, but Will felt it, bruised in his mind, heavy in his hand with the weight of the gun, firing again and again for the sole time. The lumbar vertebraes were broken, the exit wound would be just above the point where Molly’s skin sank to form a tiny pear-shaped hollow._

_Will wanted the only thing he could want. It was, at the same time, both to kill her_ and to be at her side forever. Maybe it was because he had been away from death for so long. If he had ever been able to not entirely become these killers, now it was lost on him. With Bedelia’s words turning behind his eyes, he wanted to return to the quiet, shimmering place inside where things made sense with the world. With Molly, he had brought the subdued realms in himself to agree with the outside. Maybe the coherence would come back if he ignored the bodies, went into the elevator, walked to her room and sat by her bedside, waiting for her to wake up, smile, have nothing that she knew of to forgive. _The mirrors in her eyes reflected the ceiling and Will felt the need to bend over her and look at himself. Would it be Will Graham’s face again? Or would it be a dream-shaped darkness of infinite might?_

Then something tore inside him.

He turned on his heels, walked out and he knew it was the last time he left her. In the car, a strange warmth filled him when he thought that Molly would be tougher than him. He would have this borrowed life seep out of him, unsure if it was not him who oozed out of it, just as he had oozed in.

 

* * *

 

It would have been easier if he had had something to do. Change usually came with action in his life. Events took him in their motions and he only stared as they passed him by, then he stepped in his own shoes and did it all over again, and over again, and over. Yet, the day had gone without anything. The sun had shone in thickening reds against the beige blinds of the motel room. Molly had not called from the hospital. The dog was staying at the vet until they could bring her home. Molly would.

The sun set down, the night came. He needed a solid life again. He would then shut down the intense longing for other worlds and other, past, less terrible lives.

Remembering the other motel room, he thought that he should have known already. Like the other morning when he should have tasted the person in his breakfast. It seemed far away. More whisky in his glass.

He wondered if he had even known how much of him was hurting all this time. The pain was hiding a deeper pain, really. _Hannibal asking, “What gave it away?”, Will saying, “Everything.”_ Had everything not given it away?

Staring at the ceiling, Will felt the drift taking things around him down, as if they were falling, and the air and the furniture felt closer. He lifted his head from the pillow and Hannibal Lecter was sitting in the chair in the corner of the room, head up, eyes bare. His back was straight, his arms laid out, his legs crossed, it was strange for him to be so formal in the prison uniform. “What are you thinking?” Hannibal asked quietly. Will took his head back down and closed his eyes, stubborn, thinking that he could will life to be what he wanted, bewildered to be taken by these words again. “I’m not a hallucination, Will,” Hannibal pressed. “You have forgotten how literal your imagination can be. So, your thoughts?”

During the few seconds of silence, a few cars honked outside. Will listened, trying to feel a change, in the stars and in the atoms. “I don’t know which is worse,” he said, eventually. “That this is you playing mind games with me again. Or the opposite.”

Hannibal acknowledged the dilemma with a quirk of his eyebrows. “From my point of view, both options have their advantages.” He paused, thoughtful, remembering, just as Will did. “You used to assume my point of view, Will. Do it again.”

“I don’t want to do it. I want to stop being able to do it,” Will said, thinking of Molly’s smile. “I’ve stopped.”

“No.”

Will pulled himself up on the bed and sat at the edge, pouring more whisky in his glass. “I didn’t think you wanted to sleep with me.”

“Don’t bring sexuality into this.”

Will scoffed. “Why not? Dopamine does wonders.”

“You can’t reduce a whole to one of its parts,” Hannibal insisted, curiously calm.

“Of course, you wouldn’t limit yourself to that. You don’t distinguish between life and art, or right and wrong. Petty lines usually don't stop you,” Will snapped. He swallowed. The whisky weighed heavily in his stomach.

And suddenly Hannibal’s voice was helpful, therapeutic. He was sitting in the worn brown chair like he would behind his desk. “Go back to the start,” he encouraged. “Both options. With Bedelia as my messenger, me playing you, or me not playing you. Each have distinct benefits.”

“For you.”

“Also for you.”

Will pressed his hands on his temples. “I fail to see,” he said.

Hannibal leaned back in his seat. “First option. Mind games can be comforting. They are our domain, yours and mine, our battlefield.”

“So this is a battle again.”

“Nothing’s changed,” Hannibal said, grinning, looking distractedly at the fingers of his right hand, splayed on the arm of the chair. “Some alleviation can be found in familiar patterns.”

“I don’t want to go back to that,” Will said and he was lying. “But when has it ever been about what I wanted.”

The other man smiled with a kindness that made Will wonder how cruel his mind could be with itself. “Always, Will,” Hannibal said, more breath than voice. “It has always been about what moved you from within.” Will looked away, disgusted by glimpses of himself that were absurd from a point of view, true from another, and he was in all points of view at the same time. “Or you could also consider the second option,” Hannibal went on, running a fingertip along a seam in the chair.

And Will _was engulfed_. He remembered _the light in Hannibal’s office, so clear and yet so soft_. And _the smile_ he wore when he opened the door to let him in. But the images in his mind would not get together yet. A piece of them was broken. Will suspected it was him.

A moment must have passed. “Is it so unexpected?” Hannibal asked, softly.

Will shook his head, his hands in his hair, holding… he did not know what. Maybe they would catch his mind when it would fall out and down. “I don’t know who you are anymore. I can’t even imagine you saying these things to me.”

“Saying what things, Will?”

_Molly stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, her back to him, wearing an oversized t-shirt as a pajama. She watched Walter, settled on the couch, playing MLB:15 on his PlayStation. It snowed outside and the pancakes were ready. Walter had insisted on fruitloops earlier. Will did not know that children still ate those. He had made the pancakes for him and Molly alone. They sat down to eat and listened to her son pushing the buttons on the controller, the faint noise from the ambiant soundtrack of clapping, cheering and music distant and buzzing._

_“This is good. I think,” Molly said after a while. “I don’t mean the pancakes.” She held her coffee cup against her chest. “But they’re good too.”_

_“It is good,” Will agreed._

_Molly leaned forward. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she started. “But I think we should get married.”_

_For a second, Will just stared and waited, loving how still Molly’s features would go, showing nothing but blunt affection. Then he chuckled. “Why wouldn’t it be a good idea?” he said, reaching out to clasp her fingers, seeing her soften into something incredibly beautiful, alive and healthy, like trees standing strong in the winter against the snow._

_Her smile widened and she kissed his knuckles. “Then we should do it.”_

_Will’s face grew more serious. He felt the need overcome him, to say something, something that would moor him here forever. Please, can I hide with you, inside you, and never again breath by myself, if not through you? “I love you.”_

_“No. It’s me who’s loving you,” Molly said, quietly, as serious as he was, maybe a little sad._

Will knew that Hannibal knew whenever his thoughts left to wander. He felt the eyes on him, mindful and thorough. “The things that would not fit the part you’re playing.”

Hannibal scoffed. “What do you know of it, exactly? The Baltimore socialite psychiatrist. The exposed murderer on the run. Or the privileged if compliant prisoner.”

“I know everything,” Will said, but it was not triumphant, it was only ruins.

“No. I know everything. I know why you don’t want to look at this from my perspective.”

“Enlighten me.”

“You don’t believe you can be loved as you are, with all the fathoms of your mind that daunt and outrage you, even today.”

“Stop projecting onto me.”

Shadows had appeared on Hannibal’s face as the night had grown darker. He sounded almost humored, when he said, “I’m seriously not.”

Will gestured with his empty glass. “You’re _my_ hallucination.”

“Am I? I thought I was your… better half.”

Maybe if he closed his eyes, it would help, Will thought. It did not. “You never really use the first person this much when you talk about yourself,” he recounted. “So you, that’s me talking.” He placed his glass on the table, still refusing to look at Hannibal. “I can’t imagine it. I don’t see it. Not this.” What would it even look like? “You think you love me. You just want to take me inside your head,” he snorted, then. His hands were shaking. He kept telling himself he felt nothing.

“Isn’t it where you want to be?” Hannibal said. He was closer now, sitting on the edge of the bed, at the other end.

“I won’t become you,” Will said, strongly, teeth clenched, as if he could make the words firmer and truer until they became real.

“You wouldn’t. Become me,” Hannibal went on. So soft a voice in this man, Will did not think he had heard it ever before. Really, mind of mine, you are something, Will thought. “There’s only your own self ahead of you on this course.”

“Your boundless narcissism never ceases to amaze.”

“How so?”

“It's so lethal, it’s hard to think you can keep it all bound up.”

Hannibal looked away and did not answer for a moment. “So murder is fine, but love is not?”

“Don’t call it that,” Will requested, grave. Then the words escaped, breathy. “It’s much more than love.”

Suddenly, Hannibal was so close Will could feel him, along the side of his arm, he heard the stiff material of the prison jumpsuit ruffle. Hannibal scrutinized him, but Will did not meet the eyes that examined him inside, tossed his soul around, turned every thought and studied every image. It was his own cold probing after all. Why would he even look? “Oh, Will,” Hannibal whispered. “I’m surprised you didn’t know this about yourself.”

Will shook his head vigorously, as if he could shake the feeling off, or his awareness of it, or the glowing warmth he sensed now, or the haunting void that climbed along his legs, like dizziness. “No, no, no, no. They’re your feelings, not mine,” he maintained.

“You’re empathizing with your hallucination of me?” Hannibal asked, dubious. He gave an understanding smile. “We have not left the confines of your mind. This way, to be more accurate, I should say that _you_ ’re surprised you didn’t know.”

Will would later suppose that this was the moment when he did give in, alone in his motel room, staring at the brown carpet, glass in hand. “I’m just imagining what the feelings would be,” he said, some part of him still fighting.

“You’re doing a very good job of it.” Hannibal’s hand was on his arm now, but Will did not feel it. The sight was enough to take his heart down to his stomach. “This is the moment when you kiss me,” Hannibal noted absently.

“So it’s not an act,” Will mumbled to himself.

“Is it scarier because it is true?”

“Yes. _Yes._ We should go back to wearing masks.”

Hannibal pulled away. “We cannot go back to masks now that we are both exposed to each other.”

“I haven’t even hurt you in the way I thought I had,” Will pondered. “You should have killed me.”

“The amount of pain was precisely the reason I could not bring myself to kill you.”

Will exhaled. “How did that feel like when it sank in?” He hoped it had hurt.

“Like a knife, eternal and shining. But I believe it showed.”

 _Pressing his hand against his stomach, he heard only the rush of blood in his neck and head, like it would explode. His fingers dug in against the gaping wound in his abdomen and he felt them touching the flesh inside, where it burned. Abigail’s blood was everywhere on the floor, mounting. Hannibal’s face, leaning down over his. Will hung from his eyes._ “Yeah. Looking back, it did,” he said.

“Do look back, Will.”

Breathing out, Will hoped for something like a flight. “Right now, I just want to close my eyes.”

Hannibal’s voice sounded far away. “Then do so. I’ll stay.”

 


	5. 5.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Hannibal share flat soda and talk about casualness and privacy while recovering in a vet clinic. 
> 
> Set ca. 48 hours post-TWotL (3x13).

With the door closed, all he could hear was Hannibal’s breathing, steady but hoarse, as if it took an effort, every time. They were well into the night and, save for inhales and exhales, things were especially quiet.

Will poured Seven Up in a polystyrene cup and stirred with a plastic fork until it stopped bubbling entirely. On his tongue, it tasted like the first time he had got the flu as a child. He lodged the straw in his left cheek and kept drinking, not sure if he was hungry. His stomach felt tied, he did not know whether it was acid from hunger, from pain or if it was just generalized weakness that made his body want, or not want, nourishment. The right side of his face had disappeared, it felt exactly as if nothing was there. He had been cut in half.

He set the cup down, poured the rest of the soda in and stirred again. A brief gasp for air made him lift his head. Hannibal was awake, his wide eyes searched the room for a moment and stopped on Will, where he sat, slumped in a chair by the makeshift bed. Hannibal pulled himself slightly up with unsteady arms and Will handed out the cup. Hannibal took it and brought it before his lips, eyeing the straw that had just left Will’s mouth.

“You bit out Dolarhyde’s carotid artery. My saliva can’t possibly be an issue,” Will mumbled, a hand on his wounded cheek.

Hannibal’s lips closed over the straw and he sipped. Then he pursed his lips and gave the cup back to Will. “The few carnal moments we have shared before were in the limits of murder, or its aftermath, or preparation. They were part of a formal display. This is more...”

“Private?”

“Casual.”

Will looked at the ceiling, head thrown back, and thought of his changed, ever-changing life. “Nowhere to hide.”

“Indeed. Given that we have little to hide, at this point,” Hannibal said, slowly, lying back down.

After a while, Will asked, “What would you have done with Dolarhyde, given the chance?”

Hannibal did not open his eyes, face grey, breathing even and quieter than before, as if he was concentrating on it. “Eaten him whole, perhaps. Given the proper means of preservation.” He tilted his head toward Will, eyes still closed. “But there were many wounds on him.” And on us. “I swallowed some of his blood. It suffices.”

“Not his brain, like me?”

“No. Not like you.” Hannibal’s eyes fluttered open and he looked like a collapsed statue, not shattered but broken. “His kidneys in patés would have been savoury,” he considered. Then he regarded Will with a mix of interest and enchantment. “What would you eat from me?”

Will exhaled through his nose, wincing at the tiny muscles pulling in his cheek, and offered a smile, sad and unsurprised. _He was sitting at Hannibal’s dinner table with Jack, the smell of the rain and of forbidden food between them. Still Hannibal had said nothing to reveal himself as the Chesapeake Ripper. When he reached for his wine glass, Will stabbed his fork in his hand, violently enough that the tines broke the third and maybe the second metacarpus. The other man pulled back right away, but the metal pins had already driven into the table’s wood and Jack had got up, because they had planned all of this wordlessly, had they not? They did it as they had planned it, Will holding Hannibal with his eyes and Jack going for the chest, struggling against the arm, but fitting the gun neatly so it would catch the heart, or at least the aorta._

_Once it was done, there was little blood, but the table was undone. Will could tell first, as he spoke, by the look on Jack’s face that he had not expected these words. But then, what did Jack know, Will thought, about killing someone? Had he even ever given the thought serious consideration? “What do we do with him, Jack?”_

_Came the bewildering answer to Will’s shimmering, glorious question. “He’s dead. There’s nothing to be done,” Jack said, petrified._

_“I want to have something from him,” Will said. And then it was unclear whether the light got him at this moment, or if it had been sleeping inside him all along. But it did not matter and he swirled in drunkenness, among elated clouds and whispering songs. Had he killed Hannibal Lecter right this moment, or had he started long before? The life had streamed out of his eyes. And now, Will wanted everything else inside that might be beating and warm. Something from the chest, no doubt, something that fit in the palm of his hand._

“Nothing,” Will said. “I don’t partake without you.”

Hannibal’s eyes scintillated beyond the glaze the painkillers gave them. “What makes you think I wouldn’t share it with you?”

“Still,” Will insisted.

“You would eat my heart, of course,” Hannibal breathed.

“This is us being casual,” Will said, after a moment, voice hushed and disbelieving. “We’re talking about eating people.”

“Each other,” Hannibal corrected. “It's a form of privacy.” Fingers outstretched, his hand reached for Will’s arm where it rested on the edge of the bed, near Hannibal’s thigh. Will moved closer and watched Hannibal’s fingers brush against the sleeve of his cotton sweater and then let go. “How was your casual, domestic life, before?”

Will sat up and straightened, ghosts of living people dying at the back of his mind. “I want to avoid talking about my... life.”

For a moment, Hannibal considered pushing and Will saw the idea leave his mind when his face relaxed slightly. “Your life is not over,” Hannibal veered, instead.

“It’s something else now,” Will said, voice stiffer.

Shutting his eyes again, through a shiver, maybe pain, maybe pause, Hannibal said, “We have only before shared discontinuous moments.” Through the window, some light from the dawn filtered in the room. “And for the most part of the last three years, my private life has been non-existent.”

“While I was striving to have nothing but,” Will went on.

“Even apart, we coincided. Your detached freedom matching my lack of it.”

A moment passed. Outside, the sky greyed into daylight and some birds started warbling fiercely. “You’ll get your privacy back.” Will looked out the window. “We’ll get out of here soon.”

“Your continued presence in my life does not entail a lack of privacy.”

“I know.” Will shifted in the chair again. “I’m adjusting, trying to see what’s ahead.”

“Why?”

Will took his eyes down and winced as he got up. He took another soda can from the counter, grape this time. Again, he poured, stirred, sipped from the straw. Hannibal watched him fixingly through the entire motions, content or vaguely stoned, Will was not sure. He was thinking back of the blood he had once imagined coming from Hannibal Lecter’s neck. “You never tasted my blood. You could have,” he said.

“It seemed preferable not to. Possessing elements of one’s body only means that the rest of them is not accessible. Dead or lost,” the other man alluded. Will found Hannibal’s fingers and helped them around the cup of soda. “What do you remember from Florence?” Hannibal asked. 

“After being shot, almost nothing. Jack’s face, screaming. Then I woke up in Muskrat Farm.” Hannibal closed his lips around the straw and drew a quiet sip, letting his head fall back after. “I used to dream about it a lot though,” Will added, arching his eyebrows, braced against the memories of waking in tears, yelps and sweat.

“What happened in your dreams?”

_He gasped furiously, breathing forgotten and pushed the sheets so violently off him that one corner tore up. He scrambled out of bed and fell before he reached the door, going outside and yelled the names of the dogs and it sounded like crying mixed with wails. By the time he remembered that the dogs were not in Wolf Trap, that Price would bring them back from his sister’s in Arizona next week, he had reached for his head, tearing through the hair, expecting to find naked brain and naked thoughts. And through it all, all images of Hannibal Lecter were absent and he was alone._

_Outside, the ghosts of his brain got out and roamed the world, but there was no world left at all beyond the walls of Will’s head. The only thing he had left now was his empty cranium and the echos of the words said and forgotten. What should he do with that?_

“You’d fed it to my dogs, my brain, and then they'd left me,” Will said, stoical save for the tears welling up.

Hannibal held the cup down on the bed and tried to reach for Will’s face with his other hand. Will did not know whether it was to touch the tears or wipe them. He did not move away, but Hannibal’s hand could not stretch far enough and he placed it back down on his belly, feeling for the nephrectomy scar on his right side. Will observed carefully and saw many shadows pass on his face, none of them relishing or pleased, maybe troubled that Will’s subconscious would create undignified scenarios. “If I-…”

“Could you not say anything?”

A pause to think. “Agreed.”

The chirping grew louder and unrelenting. The sun would rise soon. In the other room, the dogs and cats in the cages started to stir, meow and bark, steadily. Hannibal’s eyes had not left Will for a while. They were half-closed and only intent on looking, but not very clear. For a time, Will stared at the fingers curled on the blanket, then he covered them with his own, holding softly. “We share cells of skin every time we touch. Some part of you becomes some part of me and I do, slowly, absorb you,” Hannibal said. “It delights me.”

Some of Will’s tension left him. “That’s the painkillers,” he pointed out. Then, he nodded to the cup in Hannibal’s hand still. “I used to drink grape soda sometimes, when I was a kid. I loved it.”

Hannibal held the cup out for Will to take back. “I tasted soda in Paris. When I was a teenager. For the first time. _Orangeade_.” Then his eyes closed and he was out again.

 


	6. 6.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the early morning at a truck stop, Hannibal shares a fig with Will.
> 
> Takes place around six weeks after The Wrath of the Lamb (3x13).

Chiyoh brought the car to the far end of the parking lot. They were about to leave the highway, but they would still follow the shoreline for a time. Will opened his eyes to the sight of her walking away toward the store. She disappeared behind a large DHL truck. He pulled his head up from where it rested, partially against the window. The blood from the reopened wound had been wiped away from his chest, but a feeling from it lingered, sticky, mixed with dried sweat, and he felt like crumbled paper. He longed for a shower, with hot water and soap and peace and safety, and the water rushing on the beach to cover the sand. Under the cloudy sky, the pain came, dull at first and then in details, languid brushes and deep pulsating beats.

He sat upright and hissed from the pain in his cheek. It went down his neck, cupped his head, whirled near his ears, then came back through his throat, like a hand trying to grab his face from the inside of his chest. Hannibal was sitting in the front passenger seat and twisted around at the sound, inquiring. Will shook his head and got out of the car, hoping the fresh air would be better than the smell of dried blood, collected dust and the last owner’s cigarette smoke inside.

This life, and Will was still not sure if it was new, felt surprisingly like the old one. He had no home and he could not forget. But the fear it brought was somehow muted, swinging in the back of his mind, familiar but far and getting farther. The closeness felt like a blanket and maybe he could just shut his eyes and tilt his head back. But he did not. Hannibal was watching him from the car. His eyes were on Will and they would never let go and Will felt no pain from it.

He paced to stretch his numb legs for a while, light-headed, and ended up sitting on the car hood. By the time Chiyoh returned, Hannibal had got out of the car as well, movements careful for the scar in his side. He came to sit beside Will. His skin was greying further toward evanescence, his body decaying into a more wounded, weaker version, its need to rest immeasurable, again. It contrasted with the intense awareness in his eyes.

Chiyoh brought back Ensure for Will and chocolate bars for Hannibal and herself. She looked at Will as if she could see through him and hang him in the air just with her eyes, considering, observing, always, again. He took a bottle and drank it down against the nausea.

Sitting on the hood between them, Chiyoh produced a last element from the pocket of her coat: three ripe figs, black violet lined with thin green strokes, wrapped in a transparent plastic bag.

Incredulous, Hannibal huffed around a slight smile. “And fresh too,” he said, testing the fruits’ softness through the bag.

“Foreign owners, I think,” she explained. She took a small fruit by its stalk and chewed on it carefully, Hannibal watching her, his features showing calm and contentment through the fatigue, as he took a fig for himself. Will went back to staring at the parked trucks.

The shoreline was a few miles away, but he could tell it was there because of the amount of birds he saw hovering. Sometimes, there was a brush of wind and he could smell the algaes and the sand, the dampness and the freedom. It was sunless and white around them. Sea had always made him happy.

Pale fingers on his arm. Will took the fig Chiyoh handed him. The outside was smooth, the weight was feathery and it felt as if it was about to burst like an empty balloon. He gave it back. “Thanks. Can’t chew.”

Will went back in the car and Chiyoh gave the fruit to Hannibal.

A few drops of rain landed on the window and Will watched the streaks they made, leaning back into the seat. His shoulder was worse than his cheek now. His empty stomach was coming to terms with the food. Some strenght, he hoped, would follow. Maybe some more clarity, also. Or perhaps there was too much of that entirely.

The door from the other side opened and Hannibal settled on the other seat. He held the fig preciously in his hand, his mind apparently fixed on something, his eyes downward. Will was about to ask when Hannibal, holding the fig by its tip, put it whole in his mouth. He masticated slowly and deliberately, gazing outside. Eventually, he turned to Will and covered his mouth with his hand when he spoke. “If you'd open your mouth,” he asked, his voice muffled around the fruit.

Will’s eyes focused sharply and his brow creased with understanding. But Hannibal stayed still, jaw motionless now, waiting.

Will blinked, took his eyes down at the seat and back up. He moved slowly and shifted to face Hannibal, left palm drawn out in perplexity. The other man moved closer and leaned forward swiftly, placing his lips on Will’s. His eyes were staring, equally solemn and curious. One of his hands came to rest on Will’s neck to keep his head still. Will stiffened but moved his lips slowly apart, thinking of his wounded cheek, of his beating heart and of the outlandish contact. And Hannibal pushed the chewed fig in Will’s mouth with his tongue.

Tensing up, Will initially thought he would choke. His right cheek felt tight, the skin rigid and swollen around the stitches, and the strained muscles in his neck and face pulled. His left hand grabbed Hannibal’s forearm to steady himself and he held in place, lips squaring clumsily against Hannibal’s, not knowing what to do with his tongue, trying not to swallow right away, but failing.

As he pulled away, Hannibal was mindful to keep saliva from falling from his lips, closing them over Will’s. Then he leaned back and licked a few pips off his mouth. He seemed absorbed, somewhat pleased but not entirely. Will let go of Hannibal’s arm and rolled the chewed fruit pulp against his palate. It was overwhelmingly sweet and it felt more solid than what he had been having so far. “It's been more than three years since I could eat a fresh fig. Tastes like freedom. Thought I would share,” Hannibal said, his voice strangely hollow, leaning back against the car seat.

“Not the only thing you shared,” Will noted, when he was done swallowing.

Sitting back fully, Hannibal looked outside. Chiyoh’s back was a dark spot against the faintly glowing horizon. A flock of birds passed over the parking, a many-limbed monster going over the tiny whiter spot of the sun behind the clouds. “Is it so distasteful?” Hannibal asked, after a moment, all restraint. Under the white in his eyes, Will saw many considerations dancing and a vast exhaustion clawing up from deeper, as if all the feelings that had been heightened since so long had depleted entirely. Nothing was left but a restless void.

“No,” Will said. It came out less fierce than he had intended. “Fig’s good.” He tongued the remnants of the masticated fruit in his mouth. “Do you regret sharing?”

Hannibal’s eyes flickered downward. His shoulders squared and something like the shock of a new discovery reached him. “You participated in my freedom, Will. You still do,” he said. Will wondered if Hannibal had talked with him in his prison cell, the same way Will had talked with him, whenever the eyelids of his mind would shut, whenever he would go to the closed space inside, find it black and heavy and feel at home, secretly.

Will’s face remained blank, but hesitation extended its light limbs alongside his own. “On some days, my participation seems minimal. Like today. I’m just caught in your orbit.”

“In many ways, in this picture, you are the sun and not the planet. Do you intentionally forget?”

“You insist on my influence on you,” Will said, frowning as he realized. “Why?” But as he asked he knew.

Hannibal’s lips wrinkled and he considered before speaking, his features starting to calm down again. “It’s out in the open now, I believe. My insistence objectifies your presence here. Words and images sharpen reality.”

A ray of sunlight came through the clouds and the car basked into a sharp yellow. Everything around Will said new morning and new life, and he felt bloated with knowledge of himself. He said nothing for a while, then: “You’re always doing at least two things at the same time.” He paused, openly thoughtful. “I’m wondering what you’re doing now.”

A casual quirk of eyebrows. “Several things are going on.”

“One of them has your attention more than others. Which one is it?”

“You,” Hannibal answered, blunt, expressionless. “Were you expecting something else?”

“If you want something from me, you can ask for it or take it. You’re doing neither.”

“Your company is enough.”

“It wasn’t enough five minutes ago.” Will looked down at his hands on his thighs. He remembered sitting like this in the transport that took them away from the BSHCI. But the painkillers slowed his mind down now. He was thinking so much before. “Or do you have no idea what you want?”

Hannibal turned to eye Will cautiously. “Wanting is a curious thing, altogether. It implies that we know enough about ourselves and the world to select a sole object and rest our soul upon it.”

“You know the world, you know yourself, as much as you need to.”

“You change me everyday and renew my interest,” Hannibal said.

“Until your interests are reconfigured by my presence,” Will said, watching a shadow catch Hannibal’s mouth, then his eyes, then the rest of his face. The other man’s lips twitched and he turned away. Will found that the sight was difficult. “Next time, you can just-…”

“The next time we eat figs, you’ll be able to chew.” 

For a moment, Will stared at the honesty withdrawing from the other man’s face, like the tide leaving the glistening shore behind. Some tension was left in its place, as if Hannibal hung on the edge of something unknown and contemplated the plunge.

Chiyoh slipped into her seat and the car started again. “In three hours, we’ll be there,” she announced. “Sleep,” she said to Hannibal.

 

* * *

 

On the other side, Hannibal’s shape had sagged against the seat. From the heaviness in his limbs, Will knew he was sleeping. His eyes went back to the shoreline, the grey ocean, the invisible wind and the white birds circling above the pale road.

“Will you try to kill him again?” Chiyoh asked.

Will sighed. “I don’t…” He licked his lips and found a fig pip. “I don’t think so, no.”

“Did you like the fig?”

His eyes catching the shape of Hannibal’s hand, resting on his thigh, fingers nearly closed on his palm, Will swallowed. “He did that on purpose. And I still can’t figure out exactly what purpose it was.”

She smiled unamusedly. “So. Did you like it?”

“It’s nice to eat,” was the sour, delayed reply.

They slowed down to take an exit and the sea was left behind. Will lifted a hand to his lips and touched them again, the dim contact bringing back memories of Hannibal’s hand on his neck, never letting go, warm, safe, dark. Horror and night and force. “You’re afraid of touching him, even now?” Chiyoh asked.

“It doesn’t seem unwarranted.”

“You fear his hands or yours?”

“Both,” Will said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to trust him again.”

“You trusted him to heal your injuries. You know when you need him. You only acknowledge it when it suits you.”

There were trees around them now, rows of pines and beeches. “It’s not just the flesh he wants to touch,” Will said.

“Aren’t you curious?”

“Are you?”

“No. I know his limits in my mind. They’re fenced, at the center, deep, tangled and dying.” They turned left on a smaller road still, bearing faded signs, and as they went, the trees became denser around them, darker, thicker pines now mixed with leafless trees. Patches of snow clung to the frozen ground and Will thought of Minnesota. He thanked the painkillers that the thought did not form entirely, before it just dissolved into cold air. “Do you believe he would constrain you?” Chiyoh asked, eyes on the road, opaque.

The mental image, carefully kept, surfaced, of Hannibal on the other side of his glass-walled cell, face impassive, but soul pleading. Will wondered when had Hannibal’s manipulations turned in open questions that made him feel coherent and full. “It depends if you’re implying he never did, or if you suppose he would not anymore…”

“Violence is meaningful for both of you. I would be surprised if it did not occur again.” She looked at her watch and the car slowed down. They stopped on the side of the road, under a patch of trees whose branches extended over them. “Yet you both appear…”

“What?” Will prompted, attentive, his eyes meeting Chiyoh’s in the rearview mirror.

“More lenient. As if you didn’t fear each other as much.”

“Fear is probably the one thing I never felt near him. This realization came with its own horror, in its time.”

“What makes you think he doesn’t fear you?”

“Everything?”

Chiyoh’s face did not change at all and she held his gaze, unblinking, disagreeing. “It’s almost nine. Wake him up. He wants to make another phone call before offices close in Zurich.”

Turning to the side, Will considered Hannibal silently, before placing his left hand on his elbow and tightening slowly. It took Hannibal long enough to wake that Will felt the warmth of the skin through the sweater and the light coat. And there was warmth inside himself, as well. When Hannibal woke, it was without any tremor. He eyed Will’s hand on his arm and avoided his face, blinking against a rare ray of sunlight.

 

* * *

 

It was time for more painkillers. Will stayed in the car, tiredness now overwhelming, his right shoulder blissful and empty and numb, his mind straining to hold onto a defined feeling.

Head leaned into the phone, Hannibal paced under the trees by the car, the cold sharpening his mind whose edges dwindled into shreds as memories crowded them. His posture was not as rigid as usual, slumped a little around the waist, where his left hand sat under his open coat, weakness rising from deep inside the bones and climbing upward. In the back of his mind, thoughts went in circles. It was invigorating like unknown depths were, but at present he lacked in strenght to explore these depths.

In the car, Will’s eyes remained on him, with occasional long, heavy blinks. “Can I speak with Mr Weichmann?” he asked. The receptionist told him she was transferring his call. “Thank you very much.”

Faint classical music – Schubert, the _Impromptu_ in E-flat – played on the line. Hannibal caught sight of Will tilting his head and observing him keenly. The other man brought his left hand to the car window and placed it there, fingers splayed, touching the image of him through the glass, no doubt. Hannibal breathed in deeper and in an instant his thoughts froze in place, entirely investing the vision.

The left corner of Will’s lip moved upward in a bleak smile, and it was how Hannibal knew there had been a flicker of something showing on his own face, through the channels that pain, predicament and medecine made harder to control, something probably like affection, or fear of loss. How come he had never before noticed how transparent he was? Or was it new? Or was it not? His own, contained smile left when Mr Weichmann picked up the line.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We have a phrase in French for what Hannibal does with Will. It's _donner la becquée_ , which literally translates as 'giving a beakful'. It's what we use to describe how a bird feeds its fledgelings (chewing and partially digesting food, then putting it back into their mouths). Hence the tag.


	7. 7.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will wakes from a dream and comes to terms with some truths he keeps buried.
> 
> Set ca. seven weeks after The Wrath of the Lamb (3x13), so a week or so after last chapter.

The dream dissolved and the world cascaded. Suddenly the blackness was gone. Awakening quickly, eyes searching for marks around him, Will stayed motionless in bed, on his left side, the daylight a faint red beyond his eyelids, his own blood as a filter, rivers of it, he had not drowned yet.

Down the corridor, the floorboard creaked. Will knew the pace. Hannibal pushed the door open and found Will rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hand, struggling against his injured shoulder, the older wounds a backdrop.

“What time is it?” Will asked.

“Almost noon.”

Will fumbled with the sheets and, once their protection was gone, the cool air hit his head and neck. Outside of the blankets’ comforting warmth stood the world and its questions and answers, and the naked branches of the trees and the constant murmur of the wind, and all those other things that insisted on remaining the same while he felt entirely other. “Why is it so dark?” he finally asked, picking up the ambient obscurity that made Hannibal turn on the lamp.

“It’s cloudy. It could snow again this evening,” he said. “Can you sit?”

Nodding, Will pulled himself upright using his left arm. He felt a resistance in his pubis and he froze for a split second, hoping his start did not show. Then he used his right hand’s limited range to bundle the blankets up against his midsection. He did not look directly at Hannibal. The other man seemed oblivious as he pulled out alcohol swabs, a syringe and a vial from the bag on the bedside table, all firm motions, solid body and Will liquefied in disquiet.

“I’ll switch you to a lower dosage. Ibuprofen, this time. Do you object?”

“No. Not at all,” Will said, briskly, sitting up painstakingly. This time Hannibal stared.

The room smelled like sweat in the bed sheets and illness and near-death, or near-life. There were small smudges of blood on the pillow, from his shoulder, Will noticed dimly.

Hannibal filled the syringe from a small glass vial. “Side-effects of the codeine?”

“Vivid dreams.”

Sitting by the bedside, Hannibal took hold of Will’s extended left arm. He was clinical, not skin touching skin, but fingers holding flesh, tending, not really touching, not really hands, like clouds and visions, but Will reminded himself that he should not forget the pain, infinite, blissful, always kindling. Some shadows ran in the blankets on the bed, they crawled up to Will, and the needle went in. “Libido persists even in the severely wounded, sometimes until they are near death,” Hannibal said.

Will looked fixingly at the blood mixing with the liquid in the syringe. “Yes. Or my bladder is full.”

This once, Hannibal was careful not to let his fingers brush against the skin of Will’s chest as he parted the tails of the flanel pajama top to expose the wound, the gauze faintly stained with dried blood. “We can do this later.” 

“It’s fine,” Will said, bringing himself to stare up at Hannibal. He found eyes that were perhaps curious, but mostly bare, the face around them searching, but not keenly. Mostly, Hannibal seemed hidden or civil, Will thought.

The gauze was removed and Will shifted as the tape pulled up the skin before coming off.

“How does it look?” Will asked.

“As expected. There is some inflammation. The edges around the thread are still swollen.”

As the other man inspected the wound, Will seized the occasion to watch him while not being himself observed. Hannibal’s neck was tense, his shoulders bunched, his fingers were thinner than Will remembered them, but even now it was not clear how well Will remembered them. Like he did everytime he thought of why he could not leave anymore, Will felt both alone and in company. Seclusion was probably a better name for it. For a long time, he had stood beside the world, looking in, in another room whose door was open. Now, he was in another house, another land, and the forest protected the world from him, but the forest was horrible, and the trees wove through him and Will was rooted in the ground and became the forest. Hannibal Lecter was strangely incidental to this picture, yet he was everywhere.

“Are you considering your inclinations?” Hannibal asked after a moment, feeling the other's gaze, his eyes still on the task at hand, cleaning the wound with sterile water.

Will waited to speak, hesitating, or taking the time to select the words. “They’re not the most striking issue, at the moment.” He looked away. “They haven’t been for a while.”

Not stopping, nor slowing down, Hannibal’s hands were now applying fresh gauze and new tape. Nothing was said, until Will was asked, “Do you need my help to get out of bed?”

“No,” Will answered. He sat back against the pillows, his memory as agitated as his heart, the rest of his mind quiet, as if concentrated in walking a thin, tight rope. The rope was not leading him anywhere and when his concentration wavered and he lost grasp of the perfect tension in himself, he saw Hannibal waiting for him on the other side and fell over into the abyss. It did not hurt.

 

* * *

 

_Will pushed the button and the target wheeled toward him quickly through the empty shooting range. He saw that he had missed the chest again, twice. He was about to put the ear defender back on, when he caught sight of Alana Bloom walking in the room. She stopped three stands from him._

_For a moment, he considered not to, but he made his way to her. “Hey,” he said._

_Her eyes were not as cold as her voice was. Somewhat, it scared him, as if this was a mirror. It had never been. He did not know what it was. “You got anymore advice?” she said, her voice carrying more sadness than her words._

_“Is this your first time?” he asked. “Since I gave you the gun.”_

_She pulled off her beige coat and threw her hair off her shoulder with a knock of her head. Will did not think he had ever seen her quite this sombre. “No,” she started. “It’s the third.”_

_He could name what radiated from her now. At first, emotions were too strong, they came on like a wall, devouring, but now he could make it out. It was grief, even if Alana did not know yet who had died. But Will knew, and doing so he felt like he intruded. And he knew that he would destroy other lives, not just his own. It hit him all together._

_“Did you get used to the recoil?” he went on._

_“Yes, I got it,” she answered, and she sounded awkward, like if they should not be talking about it._

_Will could not say anything else then and only wanted to leave, because he would start thinking of their noses brushing together again, of hopeful eyes, and tearful eyes, and everything was gone._

_Alana stared at him for a time, then she turned away and put the ear defender on and starting pulling the trigger. Will heard it all. It hurt and it felt fine, he deserved it. The target came back with few holes in it, and Will felt compelled to say something. “It helps,” he said, “When you have a precise image of who you’d like to be aiming at.” She turned back to look at him, but her eyes were closed. She wanted to close her ears too. “I know it’s a horrible thing to say,” Will added._

_“Whose image do you have?”_

_Will found it amazing that he could look at her steadily as he spoke. “It used to be Garret Jacob Hobbs. Like I shot him, again and again.”_

_“Who is it now?” Alana asked, putting her gun down. There was no more grief now, there was only fear, naked and strong in its bluntness._

_“It’s…” He lied. “It’s me.”_

_Alana exhaled and tears shimmered at the bottom of her eyes. “I don’t know if that’s really scarier, or not.”_

_“I guess it’s better to keep your relationship with death as personal as possible,” Will said. “That way you can control what you feel.”_

_“This is control to you?”_

_He arched his eyebrows. “At least, I’m sure I’m seeing what I’m seeing. For me, that’s a change.”_

_“I’m sorry,” she said, but it was more defensive than regretful. “I should have known how deep this ran in you.”_

_Will blinked a few times and stared ahead, over Alana’s shoulder, at his own target, three rows on the right, and before his eyes, Hannibal Lecter hang, chin to his collarbones, a limp sack of harmless bones and soft flesh and figments of sparkling soul. “It’s always hard to know just how deep it goes. It managed to surprise even me.”_

_Alana said nothing then. Will nodded into a wretched smile and returned to his stand. Once he put the helmet back on his ears, he heard nothing and he pulled the gun up. On the target’s hanger, Hannibal lifted his head and smiled that not-quite-a-smile, a near pull of the lips, the rest of the face opening up to welcome it before it even formed. Will pressed the trigger, sobbing swelling in his throat. But the bullets caught nothing and the target came back to him untouched._

 

* * *

 

It was almost a whole hour before Will got out of bed. It was not snowing outside yet. Dressing carefully, he listened to the house’s noises, not picking up Chiyoh’s footsteps. He went downstairs and found Hannibal in the kitchen, making tea.

“I’ll go out for a walk,” Will said.

“Should I expect you for dinner?”

“I feel that I need to think for a moment,” Will replied, giving a limited smile, slipping on his coat.

“On what subject?” Hannibal asked.

“I’m not sure there’s exactly a name for it. It seems too true, too poignant to call it love. But I don’t know what else to call it,” he started, bringing his eyes up. “And at this point, it’s become considerable enough that I should acknowledge it.”

For an instant, Hannibal’s eyes were the only thing Will could see. They were dark and unprepared, as profound as the hollow spaces inside him where the emotions wreathed. Hannibal put his tea cup down and leaned slightly against the counter. “Mind the snow,” he advised. In that instant, all feelings were both brighter and clearer.

Will nodded slowly, his hands in the pockets of his pants. He walked out and the cold wind got him first. He shook and shuddered, but still his footsteps were somewhat lighter. Everything seemed to shine in pastel-shades and the night in his chest felt like home, again, like horror long lived-in.

 

* * *

 

The night came early this time of year and the snow rushed against the window as if it came straight from the darkness. Hannibal toweled an utensil, eyes on the window, while _Clark Ingram was taken into custody and swept to his feet to be placed in the back of a police truck. The doors closed with Will staring at them, tense with regret and anger, which Hannibal discerned in the square of his shoulders and the angle of his jaw. He motioned Will toward the car with a fugitive touch of his hand and the younger man walked before him, threading through the skins of dreams, while Hannibal moved steadily, nourished still by the proximity between Will Graham and death._

_In the car, they said nothing and Hannibal’s body and mind throbbed with an odd mix of contentment and awe. When they reached the highway, Will was asleep, head tilted into the window. Whenever they passed a street lamp, Hannibal saw the movements of his eyes under the lids. After less than fifteen minutes, Will awoke with a gasp, hands frantically searching his chest through the coat and the shirt._

_Hannibal watched as reality settled back in, Will swallowed dry. “Someone was trying to come out through my chest. I was trying to hold it closed so that they would remain inside, trapped,” Will said, in a low voice, as if talking to himself. Then, more clearly, “Do you dream?”_

_“If I do, I do not remember,” Hannibal explained. “In my sleep, I am sometimes aware of images drifting and moving out of sight. I have a fleeting feeling of loss when I wake. Nothing more.”_

_Will seemed weakened, leaning into the seat, surveying the road in front of them intently. Clusters of snowflakes rushed against the windshield. “Do you hope at all, for anything?”_

_Hannibal tightened one of his gloved hands minutely on the wheel. “I find it hard to bring my imagination to consider anything other than the past. But I find only myself there.”_

_“I’m the only thing in my dreams too.”_

_“The wish that there should be someone else, in the past, waiting, remains mostly vain,” Hannibal said_

_Turning to eye him, Will shifted slightly into his seat. “No one ever waits long enough,” he added quietly._

_Longing glimmered within Hannibal, so acutely he believed it could show through the pores of his exposed skin. But it did not, he remained stony and opaque, sinking deeper, faster, descending into the depths like he was going back home._

Hannibal poured the wine when he heard the front steps outside creak with Will's weight. The younger man took his coat off silently, slowly for the right arm, while Hannibal studied his features. He saw some things pass swiftly, but he could not see the dreams. But he did not know if he really wished to have them stand in the room with them. 

 

* * *

 

It was only after dinner that Will asked. “You’re not asking me how my thinking went?”

Hannibal kept his eyes on his book. “I thought it would be more appropriate to let you come forward on the matter. Besides, we have moved beyond questions and answers.”

Will exhaled slowly, thumbing his coffee cup. “You brought me to the bluff and it’s up to me to fall.”

The other man’s eyes did not move up from the pages, but they stopped reading and found a narrower focus, somewhere between the words. “Every day, I awake in a house near the bluff and I stare off at the sea. Sometimes the waves are softer when I reach them,” Hannibal evoked.

Will did not know how often had Hannibal imagined they were still in that house, waiting for Dolarhyde, forever locked away from the world, together in the stilled image he may have wanted them to become. “Suspension doesn’t suit us, not anymore,” he replied.

A small smile found its way to Hannibal’s face. “We used to float and mingle, abstract, like components of an alloy, not yet melted.”

“Do you miss it?”

“It was different. Violence and peace were in different proportions among and into us. Beauty was elsewhere. Trust was non existent.”

“I wouldn’t call it trust, just simultaneity in most things.”

Hannibal marked the page and closed the leather-bound volume with a soft sound. The edge of the pages was golden. It reflected the light from the nearby lamp and it seemed to ignite as Will stared at it. “You must seek for a name, to put on the feelings roaming inside, fighting against you,” Hannibal started, thoughtful, attentive. “Do you like what you named them?”

“Names are control, might, influence. I’m uncertain whether I want to control this feeling.”

“Why not?”

And Will considered what went on in his mind. “It’s like beauty, in many ways. It’s bigger than me. I am” – he searched for the word, gazing upward – “intensely glad it exists. I don’t need to own it. It seems enough to know that it’s here.”

 

 


	8. 8.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chiyoh offers Will a present. Hannibal and Will discuss metaphors and said present.
> 
> Takes place around two weeks after last chapter, so ca. 8 weeks post-TWotL.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't plan to leave a thank you note before the end of this, but the reception of this really amazes me. It's such a difficult, stubborn, slow relationship to depict, it seems so hard and weird to picture some times. Thank you all! Much love!

Chiyoh stood with him on the short deck. It was barely past dawn when she had come to his room. There was no sun yet, the clouds were low and thick, though there was some yellow sprouting on the horizon, where the small part of open sea met the inlet’s opening.

“Is it okay?” she asked, pushing a strand of black hair behind her ear.

Will nodded slowly, looking at the small boat in the bay, sails tied, lights out. His mind went back and forth between the unreality of the situation, and the threat he felt whenever the reality of it grew stronger, he did not dare to step forward.

“Did you get it here?” She nodded. “Where did you learn to sail?”

“I learned. The same way you did I suppose.”

And it was clear now. “You want me to leave.”

“He won’t come after you. You can be at peace, inside the head of yours where you think monsters wait.”

“You think you have no monsters of your own?”

“You know what I think.”

“That it'd be better if I was just a monster,” Will said. Chiyoh smiled in the coming daylight and extended her hands with the keys in it. Will stared into the distance and exhaled around the beginning of a smile. Then he reached for her hand, closed her fingers back around the keys and pushed her hand into her chest. “Seems to me like you’re looking for a means of escape.”

“You misunderstand yourself.”

“Keep them.”

 

* * *

 

Even now, Will could feel the arrangement of Hannibal’s mind shift, in proportions he did not yet know. It seemed well-mannered, as if things simply travelled from a place to another. Will’s own change, he knew, would be more violent. He found it hard to leave things behind, they clung to him and he let them, because it was easier to think when everything around him thought and felt too, because that way he could lose himself, and oh, the losses he wanted. And eventually, he would realize he had already left and he was in another place already.

Hannibal would glide through the memories, setting them in place, taking the time to soften the images around the edges, while Will would just wake up in another world, _in the clothes he had slept in, on the sole road there was, in the cold night, a police car in front of him, and a dog behind, and nothing at home, and nothing inside_. Then, he would wonder how real these new things around him were and, by the time he was done, they were already much more than a home, and but a soul.

The laptop’s blue glow shone on Chiyoh’s face and her eyes were black and wide, the sclera fluorescent around the irises, cradling the darkness. Will looked back down at the task, his thoughts still on the boat. He smashed the softened, baked apples with a fork. He was glad the saucepan was as heavy as it was, he could not have held it. Apples, zucchinis and onions pureed together with ricotta cheese and terragon. Once all would be mashed together, he would mix it and water it down a bit into a potage that he could sip.

_They had put Hannibal in a bulletproof glass box. Two guards stood on each side. The courtroom was full and while he went from the entrance to the witness stand, with each step, Will recalled his own trial. He had liked his own better. How he wish he could be back there. It was less of a circus and more of a tomb closing on him, and the anger was so clear and so fresh in his heart, like flowers in spring coming through the snow of his wild, captured and beaten mind._

_He knew it was Hannibal because he saw the orange jumpsuit, but his eyes did not make it up to his face. If he looked up, it would be himself that he saw. The perfect overlap between Hannibal and himself did not surprise him anymore, it did not scare him, it only hurt._

_The questions of the prosecution started. “You were subpoenaed here, am I correct?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“You offered to testify on tape and have it played before the court instead of coming here in person?”_

_“Yes.”_

_“The court agreed, but you changed your mind. Why?”_

_“Because you told me it was eloquent. That it spoke of the extent of my trauma. That it would be a good…” – he almost dropped the act, almost got up to leave, “Legal argument.”_

_“Do you consider yourself traumatized?”_

_“I dislike the word.”_

_“I’ll rephrase. Are you still afraid of Hannibal Lecter?”_

_Never have, never will. There were so many things worse than fear, so much of them kept him up at night, so many nights had tried to eat him already, so many things he could not eat now, so many nows that had changed into the past, and the past was gone from under his feet. “Well, he’s not really in the room now. Nothing to be scared of.”_

_The prosecuting attorney scoffed and looked up from her notes, brow furrowing. She was instantly thinking of how to reshape the conversation so that the defense would not ask an assessment of her witness’ sanity. “Explain.”_

_Will Graham stiffened and he hesitated, because he knew it would strip Hannibal naked and leave him be eaten alive. But he did it. “He’s physically present, but his mind is not.”_

_“Because he’s trying to make us believe he’s insane?”_

_Will smiled, humorless and contained. In one of their first meeting, when he had stated his conditions, she had accepted the first he had put down: that he would not give expertise on Hannibal Lecter’s sanity, or state of mind. What his eyes had seen had to be enough. She had agreed at the time. “I can’t say that.” He paused. “It’s a basic technique of spatial mnemonics called the_ loci _method. By associating specific memories of objects or events with elements in a list or with rooms in a space, often a library or a house, the mind creates an organized structure. Through it, one can recall complex memories in perfect clarity.”_

_“Okay. And that makes him... absent?”_

_“Yes. Hannibal Lecter has perfected this exercice and turned it into an alternate form of consciousness. He is literally_ in _his memory.” It was not overtly visible, Will supposed. But it was clear to him, in the way Hannibal stood, the repose of his face, the eyes open but undisturbed, the hands laced before him._

_The attorney turned her back to him and walked determinedly over to the dock. She threw a look at Will. “So, assuming I knock on the glass, he won’t even hear me?” she asked._

_“Don’t do that,” Will said slowly._

_But she had already._

_Hannibal’s eyes were slow to focus, but when they did, they seemed kind, which in turn seemed menacing. They looked at the attorney, then at her knuckle near the glass. “Yes?” he asked._

_Whispering voices emerged from the assistance. The judge quieted them. And all the while, Will stared at his feet, wishing he could drown his mind into itself and stop feeling like porous, rotten flesh that floated around. For a moment, Hannibal’s eyes brushed by him, but they left just as fast. Then the attorney started speaking again, Will falling silent, listening like he would from the depths of the insanity that once worried him, while she presented her first exhibit._

Hannibal was at his side by the counter, silent, his posture still stiff. He looked sideways at Will’s cautious smashing. “You should be able to chew solid foods again within two weeks,” he said.

Will's thoughts had been blurred and viscous initially, painkillers and pain and a strange panic and excitement. Now, all this had dissipated and his mind was as clear as a helplessly blue summer sky, and he could not hide from the sun. There had always been feelings between him and Hannibal. But before, they were both standing on either sides of a river, looking at each other, close and bound, but separated by what went on between them. Now, they were deep in the river and they could both feel its pulls and forces and its underneath currents. “It’s possibly better to stick to what my body can and cannot do,” Will commented.

Cocking his head, Hannibal said nothing and removed slices of toasted oiled bread from a baking sheet. “It seems like an apt strategy for conversation, indeed,” he acknowledged wryly.

Will kept his eyes on his hands. He moved the left side of his mouth in a smile that did not pull on his cheek. “In regards to you, my body is nothing if not a metaphor of my mind. I guess it’s appropriate.” He remembred _lying down on his cell cot, fixing the ceiling and Hannibal was sitting in front, they were in his office, and the pulsing light went on, and he shook, and soon the walls starting shaking too, and then he looked dimly at his skin, because it felt like he would shake out of it as well, but why would there be so much sweat on his skin. “I don’t feel so fine,” he muttered._

_In his seat, Hannibal smiled. “You’re always fine when you’re with me, Will. Stay with me.”_

Arranging the toasts on two plates, Hannibal asked quietly, “How’s the pain, then?”

A moment passed, during which Will focused on the motions of his mashing. “It’s better than when I didn’t know exactly what was hurting,” he said, finally.

Hannibal sliced another piece of bread and began to tear it in small pieces. “Would you prefer if we dropped the metaphor?”

Looking up, Will saw how intently concentrated Hannibal was on the bread. He thought of something, decided against it, thought of something else, the truth, as far as he knew. “It’s strange that the proximity I feel with you in mind cannot correspond to anything physical,” he spoke, careful.

“We cannot share bodies in the same fashion we share minds,” Hannibal reflected, now completely warded off. “Except in violence, perhaps.” He had put the tiny bread pieces in a bowl that he now filled with milk, soaking them thoroughly.

“I’m sure another approximation is possible,” Will said. “Sorry. I may have dropped the metaphor.”

Wordlessly, Hannibal passed him the bowl of milkened bread and a spoon. “No apologies needed,” he said, quickly. “Our deceptions did drop us and it seems we keep falling”. Will took the bowl and, for a while, both of them held it above the counter, hands not touching.

And Will saw it, _placing the bowl back down on the counter and moving forward until the front of both their bodies touched, and in some worlds Hannibal’s eyes were open and true, in others, they were faintly surprised and faintly hiding it, in other yet they were closed, as if still calculating, and in others, infinite versions of these worlds, they were melting, as if they decomposed, and he stood in the kitchen in Baltimore again and Will was feeling so much feelings that were his own, he asphyxiated. In others, these eyes were reaching out and Will felt a near physical pull, leaning forward and touching their cheeks, their noses, their lips together and it was like reversed fear._

Eventually, Hannibal let go of the bowl and his soul was ajar, a dim, grey light coming through. “We can focus on stylistic issues at another time,” he suggested. “The discussion could strain your cheek.”

 

* * *

 

Once he and Chiyoh had cleared the table, she retired to her room. Will was in the kitchen. Hannibal wiped the countertop clean and came near the other man, their arms brushing. Will did not move away. Hannibal stepped away to the left, resuming his sweeping motions. Then Will reached for another glass to dry and, doing so, moved minutely to the left, coming into contact with the other man’s side again.

Turning to search for Will’s face, Hannibal found it appeased, looking down at the glass, the grasp of his right hand gentle, the motions of his left hand prudent. He could not tell whether the shift had been unintentional or not, but both were relevant. “I was under the impression you might not be comfortable in physical proximity with me,” he said.

Will exhaled. “What happened to metaphors?”

The lighting in this kitchen was not as bright as the one in his Baltimore home and Hannibal missed the definite shine. But his memory was beginning _to cloud. He did not know whether the clear white light he remembered was the one from his kitchen, or the one coming from his cell when it was inspected. During so many nights, he had gazed at the skylight in the ceiling, wondering if his soul would escape, and every morning, it had not. One day, Will would come, it was inevitable, but the prison would perhaps have closed down on him entirely at this moment, leaving him no more light shafts, no more sights. Already, his dreams were getting thicker and Mischa’s features vanished, from time to time, and they seemed so far away and Will took so much room._ He started folding the washcloth. “On the moment, I could not think of one clear enough.”

All glassware was dry now and Will turned away to begin storing them in the cupboard. “Comfortable is not really it. But being near you has never really been a problem. Should it be one now?”

“No.”

“I want the outside to be a little like the inside,” Will said, his back to him still.

“And what does the inside look like now?”

Will frowned, thinking. “It’s strangely peaceful, drained and bloodless, sort of compacted around a drawn line between what I used to be and now. Or between now and something else.”

Hannibal smiled faintly. He placed the washcloth down on the counter, his shouder brushed Will’s and neither of them moved. “Like scar tissue.” 

“How is it, inside, you?” Will asked then.

“Clearer. Somewhat quiet. A beautiful day.”

“No matter what day it is in your mind, it’s always beautiful, isn’t it?”

Hannibal’s face was overrun with shadows. Will was amazed how quickly they came and how quickly they left. “No, not always. Horror isn’t beauty. Like beauty, it’s taking, it consumates, but its power is limited in time. It doesn’t persist, it drifts away. Which is all the more horrifying,” Hannibal explained.

Will’s eyes went for Hannibal’s face, then back down, then he closed them and they went inside. “I’m sorry,” he said, moving away. His side hurt, his shoulder hurt, his face hurt, all places where Hannibal had ever touched him hurt. And also all the places he had touched Hannibal. They hurt outside of his body, transcendent and solar. “I know prison was bad. I’m sorry.”

“I put myself there.”

“Like you put yourself here, together, with me.”

“You’re not a prison, Will.”

Theirs arms touched again, none of them raised their hands. They were only statues straying. “One day, I will be,” Will said, quietly. “Chiyoh wants me to leave,” he added.

“So she does.”

“I don’t intend to.”

Hannibal’s voice was lower now, as if hope pushed it down, down, further down his throat. “I’m aware of that.” He held Will’s gaze. “I make it a point to choose where I am confined.”


	9. 9.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While their boat is moored, Will and Hannibal talk, sleep and drink wine.
> 
> Takes place shortly after last chapter, 2 months post-TWotL.
> 
> Sorry for the late night update again. I've been making tons of small edits on this since 8 PM.

The boat rocked slowly and it was dark in the cabin. Hannibal lay back on his bed, book splayed on his chest. A veil of clouds and mist hid the sun and rain was coming, maybe tomorrow, maybe the day after.

 _Alana sat on the other side of the table on the other side of the glass of his cell. They held their glasses up in a toast, then they ate. Duck breasts, part smoked, part grilled, served in a salad with mango chutney, onion_ confit _and green sprouts. As they neared dessert, Hannibal said, “You shouldn’t wear Margot’s suits. The fit is not quite right at the hips.”_

_Placing her fork down to take an alfalfa sprout with her fingers, Alana straightened in her seat. “With nursing, my breasts have grown too large for my own.”_

_“True,” he approved. “Why not have them tailored to your chest?”_

_“It fluctuates,” she said. “I also like wearing her clothes.”_

_“Is depersonalizing agreable?”_

_She cocked her head. “Do you really want to talk about that?” she pressed. “Will’s clothes wouldn’t fit you, would they?”_

_He stared down at the table for a time. “No, they wouldn’t,” he conceded, lifting his eyes to catch sight of himself in the glass. “But then it wasn’t his clothes I was going for.”_

_The walled face Alana put on showed her fear mixing with power, then moved on to gentleness, manipulative or curious, Hannibal could not yet tell. “No. Of course not.” Then she got up, pushed her chair back flush with the table and placed her fork and knife in a neat angle in her plate. “Who would have thought?” she asked, candid._

_He waited until she thought he would not reply. “Thoughts are reassuring, until they perish with us.”_

For the night, Will brought them to a small bay, north of a wild beach crowded with bulrushes. The clouds had built up on the horizon, filling with the setting sun’s rays, as if exploding in reverse. He secured the sailing boat to the abandoned, decrepit dock. Hannibal jumped down, bathed in reddening light. He stared at the ocean and for a time, his face looked plain and younger.

Getting down on the dock to inspect not the knot, but the rotting pole it was on, Will felt Hannibal’s gaze on him. The other man said nothing as he walked away.

It was night when he returned. He had books and wine. They had to walk carefully on the wharf, making sure not to step through the sodden wood, the flashlight’s eerie blue catching in the flapping waves.

 

* * *

 

In the nightsky showing through the cabin’s tiny window, Will saw his reflection and the shadow of his beard growing, the scar on his cheek left a whiter gash in it. He cracked his jaw as he reached the last verses of _Ash-Wednesday_. The evening had been damp and the night was growing cold and Will mellowed in time with the boat’s anchored sway, sitting at the small dinner table. Hannibal was in his bed, head prompted on two pillows, reading _Paradise Lost_.

In Will’s mouth, the flesh still felt different, warmer, as if constantly heated by the work it was doing to heal itself. He wondered if he would need to work on himself again, or if he was a finished piece. He felt final. It felt as if everything was into view. Things could be missing, but he could see them at the edge of his vision. He stood above himself, and he did not find himself just or fair, or good, but it was a path of pain, honest in its searching.

He heard Jack’s and Alana’s and, among them, his own voice, coming from his mouth, none of them gentle or forgiving, and he saw his very own face, doubtful – and they all asked if he were sure that it was him that looked at himself from above? And he answered, as often, that there was no certainty beyond the boundaries of his head. Now, he knew that if it was not Hannibal who saw him, or if it was not himself that used Hannibal’s eyes to see himself, then no one would see him ever and he would not see himself. As much as walking blind in the world could be safer, _he could not now unlearn how to see. And all he had not seen. He could have seen and found Hannibal sooner._

_“I forgive you.”_

_The catacombs wall closed down on him and he got deeper. He heard steps, but he could not see clearly. And he turned and turned and turned, until he found Hannibal, unexpected, waiting._

_Will stopped and tried to breathe. “Thank you,” he found himself saying eventually. “For your heart.”_

_And Hannibal’s voice had apparently changed, because Will was hearing it for the first time. “Are thanks really in order?”_

_“It was a sincere gift,” he went on. “I dreamed it tried to get at me.”_

_“Do you think it would have been violent?”_

_Will squinted in the darkness. The candlelight seemed to diminish. “No, no. But it wasn’t pretty.” Will held out his hand as Hannibal walked closer, and then turned into a corridor. “Abigail was with me.”_

_Hannibal smiled. “No, she wasn’t. Nor am I.” And then he was gone. The candlelight faded and Will was thrown back into the sun outside, the tourists and the city and the crowds._

All of this played out silently, as he stared at the words he was no longer reading. It had been a moment already and he put the book down, flat on his lap. Hannibal was still lying on his back, no longer reading either. He had one hand flat on his abdomen over the blanket, the other held his book, tilted away, and all Will could see were his eyes. They were on him, not particularly wide, but showing something he only rarely saw, something they would seldom show, if not for Will’s inattention. It was a piece of another darkness, that came from a deeper entanglement within.

“Something on your mind?” Will asked.

Hannibal blinked and the specific darkness was gone. “I believe I prefer Chateaubriand’s translation to the original. An admittedly rare sentiment,” he said, gesturing toward his book, a soft voice the only reminder of what had been seen.

Will put Eliot aside and smiled tightly, his cheek stiffening. “I don’t think so.”

Arching his eyebrows, Hannibal lifted himself on one elbow. Will moved to sit on the bed, near Hannibal’s feet, distant enough, never away. “As much as I would enjoy debating the issue of some translations’ superiority over the original, I think both of us are too tired for the discussion at this hour.”

“I don’t think the French translation of Milton was what was on your mind,” Will clarified.

“What then?”

Will swallowed. “A wish for the sole remaining thing that we have yet to share.”

Hannibal considered the words for a moment and many others ran through his mind. “Wish is perhaps not the appropriate term.”

Placing both hands on his knees, Will looked away, then his shoulders rounded forward, as if giving in. “Define intimacy.”

“To sleep in another one’s nest, as if into your own, and witness what they cannot see of themselves, standing in their nighttime.”

“Very cryptic,” Will said, raising an eyebrow.

“You find it clear enough.”

Will smiled, not without sadness. “A lot of things are clear now. And yet they get clearer everyday.”

Waiting a moment, Hannibal stared out the tiny window. “Am I still your inner voice?” he asked then.

“No, not really. You don’t need to be inside my head anymore. We talk everyday,” Will said. “Intimacy implies that there would be something to gain from proximity that we don’t already have.”

Hannibal tilted his head. “I liked to think of your head as my home.”

“You still like it.”

A fine smile. “So I do.” He sat back in bed, drawing farther slightly, straightening, eyes tired. “Intimacy could be strange. It could also be the dark, while we see each other in the light.”

“Ordinarily, we don’t touch, yet touch. So we should touch yet not touch?”

“I’m not suggesting we should,” Hannibal whispered. His eyes were closed now. He opened them when he felt the bed sheets stir.

Hannibal did not see Will move exactly closer. He only noticed a change in his bearing. “Lie back down,” Will started.

Focusing now, the older man lay back and found Will moving alongside him, pushing him back against the wall. Will slipped his legs under the covers and they were side by side. Hannibal tacked to the wall, but the single bed was narrow. The lenght of their bodies pressed together, thighs and arms brushing, that should have twined for more comfort, chests close, foreheads almost touching on the pillow, and there was no blood, no blade and no dream. Will was lying on his uninjured side, and Hannibal faced him, stubborn, exposing himself to better keep to himself, the tiredness gone, changing into suspicion, moving on to something hard and pure, like danger, or maybe not.

Will took Hannibal’s book from where it was, caught between them. He marked the page, then craned his arm out of the bed to set the volume on a nearby chair. Hannibal’s eyes followed his every movements, tracking him as he settled back in the pillow. “Is this okay?” Will asked, after a moment.

“Yes,” Hannibal said, eyes lost in Will's closeness.

“You can’t sleep on your wound. Turn around.”

Hannibal’s face twitched slightly, his eyes searching outside for a place to rest. The rest of his expression looked like the surface of seawater when currents are fighting beneath. “It’s a small bed, Will. You’ll have to hold me close.”

“I already do that all the time, if not literally,” Will offered, strangely kind, but not entirely soft, examining, inquiring still, his questions mostly for himself, Hannibal a reflection in the glass.

Thinking about saying something else, Hannibal eventually reconsidered and twisted around carefully until he laid on his left side, face to the wall. Will held him, then, and Hannibal pushed the other man’s hand into his chest with his own.

“I felt your heart stop,” Will started. Hannibal heard the words in his neck. “When I got out of the water, I listened and it wasn’t beating.”

Eyes shut to better detail the sensation of Will’s chin and nose against the back of his head, Hannibal said, “I only remember waking.” _The detailed sensations: liquid and cold darkness underneath him, sand all around, shattered, dancing lights on the ocean far away, night seeping in. His mind torn between passion and action, registering everything and acting as needed, lying there and watching the pain and Will and the pain or getting up and walking. He had chosen before the thought was done._

“You walked with your eyes closed. The sound of your breath didn’t sound like breathing at all.”

“There was water in my bronchial tubes,” Hannibal said, motionless.

“What do you remember, after waking up?”

“Adrenalin vanishing. Shock settling in. Numbness in my right leg,” he listed.

“Bodily informations?”

He curled his left arm under the pillow and felt the weight of Will’s head partly on it. “Why not? You must feel the warmth now. Is it not entirely corporeal?”

“I feel it,” Will whispered.

Soon, he was cradled into something that slowly merged with sleep. When he woke, farther in the night, and thought to slip out of bed to turn off the light, he did not move and searched himself, but he found that all within seemed undisturbed, as if he had fossilized. He slept again.

 

* * *

 

Morning came with a brisk wind that brought them in deeper, wider waves. The sunlight was jagged. On the ocean, there was nothing particular to see, their eyes would lose sight in the distance.

Will was alone on this boat and none of it was real, he thought. It was all a dream, like his nightly conversations in Hannibal Lecter's office had been a dream, _before he woke up with his intestines hanging in the open_. Plunged into sunlight, he closed his eyes and imagined _walking into Hannibal’s home on one specific evening, amidst the police cars, finding Abigail, alive, smiling, telling Jack he had called, and the relief of Hannibal having left merging with the greatest pain he would ever have felt, and then the arrest, you called him, Will, why?, I wanted him free, I wanted him unharmed, You wanted him to kill again, and his words killing Will, Yes, I did,_ and he pressed a dry kiss to Hannibal’s shoulder, maybe thinking he still slept.

A moment passed. “Will...” Hannibal asked.

“I’ll go see what’s up with the wind,” Will said.

For an instant, Hannibal could not wish to breathe any other air then the one circulating so close to Will’s mouth. He wished only for this mouth to open so wide as to swallow him forever. This way, he could make a living in Will’s body, shrinking until he would fit in the warm nest between his spleen and the ligaments holding the stomach, so as to feel everything he felt.

Hannibal pressed himself to the wall, while Will extricated himself from the bed and the traces of his legs on the inside of Hannibal’s stayed warm for some time. He watched Will change clothing, feeling the soreness of the night’s tense sleeping position settle in his body. The other man pushed a thick sweater over his head with difficulty, struggling with the limited movements of his shoulder.

Looking down at the small steps leading to the deck, Will could not shake away the image of Hannibal up on his elbows in the bed, naked chest, face open and emotions overt for a moment, channeling around Will in a cloud that did not invade him, yet suffocated him.

Some days, he suspected there was no truth to Hannibal Lecter, instead there would be just images flickering by, some more honest than others, but none that were not constructed. On other days, he knew he saw some truth and it hurt, and he knew because it hurt, in the same way it would hurt to part the flesh and go deep, so deep in someone’s body until you got to bone. It hurt not the way it would if the bones were yours, but if you were the ones reaching them, while the bleeding body looked at you, wide-eyed, all wrath.

Once they faced the wind and the hull split the waves, the rocking grew less pronounced and they sat for breakfast.

After that, each of them slept in their own bed. The solitude allowed Hannibal to harvest all fragments of memory, all shard of a moment and putting them all in a separate spot, so as to disintegrate the moment and remember every single one of its parts on its own. Once he would be done, perhaps he could put them all together and feel them as one, but not right away.

 

* * *

 

They drank the wine on deck in silence in the evening.

“Alana told me your clothes would not fit me.”

Will turned the words in his head once, before he chuckled quietly. “You had interesting conversations,” he said around a smile. “Did she bring me up?”

Hannibal shifted and pushed a strand of hair from his forehead. “Only under certain circumstances.”

The waves were gone and the peace of the sea brought quiet all around. “She was right. Your shoulders are broader than mine,” Will said in his glass of wine. They were short straight glasses, no stem, no ball. The sun had set and the wine looked fairly swarthy, yet not as substantial as blood, nor as restful as the ocean.

“I would rather be under your skin.”

Gazing into his glass, Will breathed out slowly. “I know. It’s warmer inside.” He paused and stared back at Hannibal. “You should have told her that. If you wanted to creep her out.”

“I managed.” Hannibal set his empty glass on the wood between them. “The outside of your skin is not without advantages.”

Will’s eyes followed Hannibal's hand and stayed with it where it rested on the railing. “Such as?”

“You’re alive.”

He hesitated before asking. “When did you stop wanting me dead?”

Hannibal moved to tighten the sweater around himself. “Time has gone by and back so much now, it’s become hard to tell.”

Will sipped the last of his wine from his glass and put it next to Hannibal’s. “Is that bad?”

Not smiling, Hannibal replied, “There is no such thing as bad where you are concerned, Will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And as a francophone, I have to confess Chateaubriand's translation of Milton kicks some decent ass.


	10. 10.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will searches for Hannibal after a nightmare.
> 
> Takes place a few weeks after the last part (now, around 3 months post-TWotL).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll stop apologizing for posting late, since it's become a habit. This chapter is a lot longer and heavier than usual, however, probably a bit too much. The following ones are shorter and neater.

_The insides were so dark. Will leaned forward to see them better, but the light stopped around Hannibal’s body and would not allow him to look. His hands fumbled inside the cavity, trying to remove as much as he could from it. It would not stop spilling. The lungs were tightly attached through the trachea. He paused, thinking he should have done this from the front._

_With an incision to the side of the neck, he could severe the trachea, then detach the lungs. Some of the pooled blood was starting to coagulate: it had a specific thickness, like its own slow death. He turned the body around and found the eyes where he had left them, hanging from the optic nerve on the cheeks, like strange tears. And inside the ribcage, Hannibal’s heart beat was steady and unchanged. He removed the eyes first, cutting them free, and he placed them down on the coffee table. They swiveled and stilled in the blood with pink muscles wrapped around them._

_Starting from the back, he broke the ribs open wider and dug in. His knife reached the trachea from the inside and he pulled the organs out. There were many lasceration and he had not severed the arteries and so the heart came with it too. And it kept fluttering in his hand. Will could not forget the bird and Bedelia’s voice and as she was saying the words, she imagined his feet crushing the smaller, quieter creature, the sunlight absent around them._

_Will let go of Hannibal’s body and it was strangely empty, like discarded clothing, the skin turned to fabric and the life turned to faint impression. He reached out and tilted Hannibal’s face up, trying to witness the fading of this feeling of life. But there was nothing to see._

_He reached for the eyes on the table, took one and placed it down in the chest cavity. They sat on the diaphragm. His hand went to get the other._

* * *

And Will woke up, one hand stretching toward the bedside table, searching for the glass of spilled water that lolled there. Yanking the covers, he shivered and let the horror settle down into an immediate, heavy discomfort. His head was filled with too much images for it to hold. The walls would crumble.

Winston looked at him from the chair where he slept, head cocked, guarding the shadows. Will got up and petted the dog’s head, sinking his fingers in the warm fur. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay. Everything’s fine,” he shushed. The dog nudged Will’s neck with his head and Will closed his eyes and relished, home again, before home became smoke, then crystal and truth.

Sitting back on the bed, he figured he should just lay down, sleep again, unafraid of the other nightmares, certain that they would come. But the thoughts became insistant. What if it was a memory? What if today was three days later? Will held his head and tried to listen to the house’s noises, but heard nothing. What if he had killed Hannibal? And his life dissolved under him. He put on a sweater and slipped out in the corridor.

His heartbeat quickened when he did not find Hannibal in his bedroom. He went down the stairs, step brisk and fast, wondering what would be more terrible, to find the body or not.

All came to a stop when he reached the living room. Hannibal stared at him from the couch where he sat, drawing by the lamp.

Will stood motionless, hand on the doorframe. Winston had followed him. The dog sat at the entrance. Hannibal examined Will, his ruffled clothing and the haste on him, then asked, “Did I kill you, in your dream?”

Wondering what had given it away, the sweat on his body or the look on his face or whatever had come out in his eyes, Will walked to the couch. He sat down cross-legged on the ground in front of Hannibal, his back to the heavy coffee table. His body was taking some time to calm down, settle, no more change, not again. “No, no. I did it,” he whispered, his hand to his forehead. His hair was still damp.

Setting his pen down, Hannibal placed it on the unoccupied place at his side, parallel to the cushion’s seam. “How did you do it?”

Will hesitated, but not as long, maybe, as he would have before. But it was not nothing either. Death. “I opened you in the back, and I…” He sighed, put his head back against the wood, shut his eyes, focused. “I pulled your lungs out, then I took your eyes and I placed them in the chest cavity. They were on your diaphragm. But you weren’t dead.” And the words left out the enjoyment budding inside, actions weaving together until there was hardly any feeling left, the triumph and the weight and the pain, all wrapped and bundled.

“Did my heart come out with my lungs?”

“Yes.”

“Why did you start from the back?”

“When the dream started, it was already done. Or I don’t remember anything else.” Will paused and looked at the couch behind Hannibal’s shoulder. “I felt my hands inside of you exactly like I would your hands inside of me.”

Hannibal seemed to ponder the words for a time. “I am uncertain whether it would cause me pain. To have you harm me in such a way.”

“I would make sure it did,” Will said.

“And I would make sure to share it with you. It would be ours. An infinite return to each other’s torment.”

Will smiled mildly. “Until it would not be pain anymore.” And he felt it in his fingers now, the not-pain, the not-joy, the lack of all those things.

“But rather solely the immediacy of each other.”

A moment. “Then I woke up. I was not... satisfied with it. I shut out,” Will went on.

“I would certainly have enjoyed the sight,” Hannibal answered, in a low voice. He looked at Will with unrefined intent, fueling the manifold of emotions inside, those that Will saw only when they surfaced, and they mostly did so when the ocean above them was one of loss and hurt.

But there was nothing like this now. So he asked. “This thrills you, doesn’t it?”

Hannibal composed himself. It was as if he had frozen over. “Your relationship with death is the most intimate one in your life, Will. The occasions in which I can be a part of it are always to be treasured,” he explained.

“Is it this form of intimacy you are still after? In me, with me?”

The sketchbook was closed and joined the pen beside Hannibal. “You know the answer already. But you ask anyway.” Hannibal’s eyes flashed with the familiar detached, shaded inquisitivenes. “What do you want to rouse in me, Will? Or do you want to do so at all?”

Will considered the man in front of him. Hannibal was no longer only a force, standing like the rock of the cliff, or moving like the storm striking it, always impersonal. There was something there that Will wanted to see brought in daylight, so that it would no longer only be visible in the darkness of his mind.

He tried to bring his eyes up. His throat was dry. “I don’t think I could willfully choose to excite you or not. What you feel doesn’t depend on what I want, I wouldn’t interfere with it.”

Tilting his head in curiosity, Hannibal asked, “Then why speak at all?”

“It just feels improper not to tell you.”

Hannibal exhaled around slightly parted lips, all attention and eyes. “What do you judge improper to tell me?”

Shaking his head, Will shrugged. “Mundane stuff. Or things that hurt but that aren’t related to you. Like you don’t really tell me about your sister.”

“Some regions of the mind are better left to decay on their own. Like some other things are better left unmentioned.”

Not knowing precisely where actions ended and emotions began, Will slid on his knees and then rose on them, his face level with Hannibal’s. “Other things,” he breathed, lifting his hand to stroke a strand of ash-blonde hair. Hannibal shut his eyes when Will’s fingers grazed his ear.

He opened them again when they reached his jaw and Will’s face was so close to his own, there was almost nothing to see.“Not entirely other,” Hannibal whispered.

“And not entirely things either.”

Their foreheads touched first, and the tips of their noses. “I wonder what they would be then.”

“Right. There’s that, isn’t it?” Will said.

They had never been so close withtout agony and death. It seemed like something was lacking in the room, like the air was too clean, too wholesome, a block of grace. “Will.”

Will placed both hands on Hannibal’s shoulders and slid them down, looking at his fingers moving, while Hannibal’s mouth touched the hair on the side of his head. For a moment, they said nothing. Then the memory of all things blood, wet, skin and slippery faded from under Will’s hands and there was only Hannibal left. Behind his sealed eyes, images passed that he could not name.

He rested his closed eyelids on the skin of Hannibal’s neck. He felt his lips on his ear, and he heard his breathing, steady but rapid. Then the sensations merged together into a singular one, it was a person, it was Hannibal, and it was not, not really, and it was light and force and the transparent spear that went for the gut, missed and took the soul. Hannibal held him tight so that he would never detach. Here and now, there was no such thing as away.

 _After a while, Will turned his head into Hannibal’s shoulder and eyed the cliff fall, only a few inches away behind them. It was so black against the glimmering, gold lights from inside the house._ _“_ _I was thinking of throwing us down._ _”_

 _The other man’s jaw moved into his hair when he spoke._ _“_ _Did you change your mind?_ _”_

_“I'm not certain yet.”_

_And Hannibal’s arms went tighter around him._ _“_ _Then we’ll wait here for you to be._ _”_

_All Will’s eyes would find of the ocean beneath were moving shells of moon._

Then their lips touched. First kiss, second one. Angling their heads, closeness in the texture of hair and ears. Pressure on the outside, undistinguishable from the roaring warmth, bursting against the seams of the inside. Hannibal’s hands on Will’s shirt, taking him in. Will’s hand on his neck, taking him down against him. Will’s waist between his parted thighs.

Then Will breathed through his nose into the kiss and they stopped. “I, uh, I’ll taste like sleep,” Will said.

They stared, very close, noses touching, minute movements everywhere, fingers weighing, shoulders backward, cheeks caressing. “Let me see,” Hannibal offered.

Lips parted, eyes insisting to gaze. Tongues. Third kiss, holding out. Fourth, fifth. Not lips and kisses anymore, but mouths and chests together.

When Will settled his face in his neck, Hannibal paused, nose against the skin of his temple. His eyes closed finally and the darkness was another body and another soul against his. Will moved slightly back and observed him, not hidden. “There it is, then,” Hannibal whispered.

“Do you always kiss with your eyes open?” Will asked.

“I may have made an exception for this one time.”

Will touched their cheeks again, while Hannibal’s lips kissed air near his jawline. He pulled away, but did not get up. The room was dark and aching, and the other man’s hands held onto him and then let go. “I didn’t expect it to be this way,” Will said, something in his eyes close to sadness, but not there yet.

“What way?”

A quiet smile. “It's nice.” Will stepped away. “I should get back to bed.”

Licking his lips, Hannibal could not swallow yet and lose this trace of Will to the blind depths of his body. He looked at the other couch, near the fireplace. “Stay here.”

A shadow of reflection skimmed over Will’s face. It was more feelings fitting together than occasion for thoughts to form. “I’ll get some blankets,” he nodded. He passed by Winston in the corridor, the dog lifted his head and wagged his tail and Will scratched him behind the ears. He stopped in front of the linen cupboard and let his forehead rest against the wooden panel. He had expected hurt and depth and other unknown things, and it was just a man and all of it.

_“Did you decide?” Hannibal asked in Will’s shoulder, the cold and the wind plastering their blood on them._

_A few instants passed, and Will made his mind. “Yes.” When he pulled away, his blood stuck to Hannibal’s shirt. “I’m cold.”_

_“It is cold.”_

_“I can’t move.”_

_“Yes, you can.” And Hannibal took them back, across the stoned path, around the bench, dragging his rigid right leg. Their eyes drifted on the dragon’s body._

_“Once you see it, there’s no unseeing, is there?” Will asked when they slipped back inside, into gold and warmth._

_“No. But sometimes the images pale.”_

When Will went back to the living room, Hannibal was drawing again. He looked up when Will walked in and his eyes drank the air around him. Lying down on his side, knees up, head into the pillow, Will fell asleep in one smooth moment.

 

* * *

 

_It was always windy by the cliff. Will closed his eyes and leaned back in the wooden seat, the rising sun touching his cheek, his neck. Before him, Dolarhyde’s body laid motionless, eyes shut, wings spread under him like a welcoming bed._

_Hannibal left the house and walked toward him. He wore immaculate clothing, and his hair was as long as it had been when Will had met him, and the scars were healed already. Will wondered if he had scars at all in Hannibal’s palace. Maybe just in this one room, the cliffside view. Hannibal sat down at his side and waited for the sun to reach his face, silently, eyes stopping on the dead body, sometimes._ _“Coffee’s ready,” he said, finally._

The room was empty when he woke up. Morning was there. Winston had climbed on the couch with him and was cuddled on his right foot. The dog jumped to the ground and scratched his nose with his front paw, and Will twisted his ankle and curled his toes until sensation returned. Sitting up, he stared at the place where Hannibal had been earlier and he wondered if he had spent the night here, with him. Winston’s nose touched his hand, and Will smiled and rubbed the dog’s sides and belly.

He found Hannibal in the kitchen, dressed, sealed up, maybe a bit tired. Will took the cup of coffee he offered and watched blatantly, wondering what he saw now, wondering why he should wonder, and Hannibal let him watch, eyes on the pan before him.

Steam rolled above the black liquid and soared from the porcelain cup into the air, its swirls matt in a ray of sunshine. “It never occurred to you to seduce me? I mean, from day one?”

“Seduction has many meanings, not all of them immediately obvious,” Hannibal replied, face unchanged.

Will leaned against the fridge door. “Romantically, specifically.”

“Mostly, it did not seem appropriate. But maybe is a rational answer not entirely possible.”

“Reason has nothing to do with this. Or, if it does, it’s only insofar as it doesn’t keep us from feeling things much more strongly than others do.”

Adjusting the heat under the pan, Hannibal added a touch of white wine to the green onions sizzling in cream. “Communicable, then.” He paused. “I did not want you to entertain the wrong idea.”

“Love would not have been the wrong idea.”

“That you would think that this would be limited to love would be the wrong idea.” Hannibal looked sideways at Will. “Unequivocity is not something I enjoyed, regarding you. Or are you luring yourself, Will, again?”

“I just assume you know yourself as well as I know you, inside and out,” Will said, his voice lower, while he touched the coffee cup to his chest, warming the skin.

Hannibal said nothing for a moment. He waited until the _oignons verts à la crème_ were done. “Did your wife seduce you?”

Will steadied his voice, blinked. “Don’t go there.”

“Why?”

“Because nothing good will come out if I walk into this place.” Will’s eyes found the floor and did not leave it until Hannibal offered him his plate to take. Scrambled eggs with lard, poached greens and fruit ribbons.

They sat down at the table under the window. Outside, the snow had melted on the porch and had left puddles of water behind. Reflected sunrays darted up, an aggressively beautiful morning, all painted in pale blue and blunt yellow.

The same yellow as the sun’s, coming up _over the frozen land. The police brought him and Winston back home and Will spent thirty minutes in the shower. His fingers were pruned when he came out. The dogs were outside, barking, running, happy in the dawn, except for Winston, tired, who had dozed off in the corridor, opening a watchful eye when Will walked to the kitchen, scratching his head on the way._

_Authentic fear of himself was what gripped Will when he took his phone and dialed._

_It rang three times. “Hello?” Hannibal Lecter answered, obviously awoken._

_“It’s me. It’s Will,” he stuttered. “Can I see you today?”_

_A second passed. Sounds of ruffled clothing. “What happened, Will?”_

_“I just… Could you… fit me in between two appointments, or something?”_

_“Will.”_

_Will closed his eyes, ran a hand through his hair. He did not manage to think before the words came out of his mouth. “I sleep-walked. Police found me five miles from home.”_

_A silence minutely longer. “Do you feel apt to drive? If not-...”_

_“Yeah. I can drive.”_

_“5 Chandel Square.”_

_“Now?”_

_“Yes, now.”_

_He left the dogs behind, climbed into his car, drove faster than he should have and when he walked into Hannibal Lecter’s kitchen, Will opened his arms as wide as he could and crushed the other man against his chest, devouring, reducing him to pieces. The only way to grow stronger was to assimilate the monsters. Will tore at Hannibal’s chest and there was only more sunlight beneath it, more empty lands, more desert. “You knew. You knew. You knew,” Will repeated. And it went on over and over and no one drank coffee that one morning._

They ate in silence. Will was done with his breakfast, fork and knife put down. He sipped the last of his coffee, when he asked, “What were you getting at?”

“Romantic pursuit would not have operated on you at all, giving your lack of response to common social stimuli and the circumstances surrounding our relationship.”

Will frowned. “You never know. I used to appreciate your company.”

Setting his fork and knife at a different angle, Hannibal studied the sunlight’s beam on them, finding sound beauty in the sole presence of luminosity, remembering the thick, constant dusk of his prison cell. Will looked at him, determined, but Hannibal would not defend himself. His limbs felt looser, less heavy at the thought. “Given what I knew at the time and what I sought, to seek your friendship appeared like the best option,” he said.

“Best option for what?”

“Securing you to me until there was no such thing as me or you.”

Will blinked and looked out the window. He had dreamed recurringly, _the first fevered nights spent in the clinic, in cars, in unknown rooms, of waking up stitched to Hannibal Lecter, Will’s right shoulder sewed to Hannibal’s right side, the nephrectomy scar gaping up and eating him entirely little by little, as if on its own. The gnawing of teeth was like the bite of the needle, threading into his skin, and the sight of Hannibal leading it in and out and in and out faded away. And eventually, it was his fingers that Hannibal used as thread. They lenghtened as far as Will could see and slimmed down. Now Hannibal could not pull his hands out and Will felt comforted. It was better to keep it close, as close as possible, inside, kissing his wounds, from the inside, kissing, kissing, kissing._ And when they had kissed last night, Will had not known if he was still someone definite. It seemed he was only an event _._ “Aren’t we there already?”

“Not quite, no. But I believe I prefer it this way.” Hannibal glanced down. “There are no less desirable parts of you.”

“You want everything that’s inside. You made sure it was already yours.”

“Have I?”

Smiling faintly, Will scoffed and placed his coffee cop down on his plate. “There’s a lot I still don’t remember. You’re the only one to know what I did and what I felt. A murky portion of my mind is shut to me and open to you.”

“I cherish this part, even if it is little of you that I do so possess.”

Hannibal’s gaze had left Will now. The sun was higher and the trees outside regained their colors, beyond illumination. “What you feel for me. Was it gradual, or sudden?” Will asked.

With a light quirk of eyebrows, the distinctive inscrutability returned. “Gradual. Like the coming sunlight, unnoticeable until I was blind without it. You?”

“I don’t know exactly. I know it hurt. The more I got closer to understanding it, the more it hurt. But once I did, it was better. Then I felt like I saw so much of you there was no sight involved at all, only feelings. Then these feelings were mine. Truthfully mine.”

A moment of uncertainty, then Hannibal’s fingers adjusted his plate to the left. His eyes did not go to the window to meet Will’s, as if their stares would reflect in the glass and collide. “Are they still yours?” he asked, his voice low.

“Yes. Right now, yes.”

On Will’s face, a brand of concentration came that Hannibal had come to correlate with a moment of light dissociation, the one caused by the actualized landscape of an unfolding memory. Will’s breathing deepened, the imperceptible movements in the muscles of his face and eyes became more spasmodic and less coherent. Hannibal waited until it stopped. Will’s eyes sought for his and gave a small smile. “What were you considering?” Hannibal inquired.

Will’s smile widened briefly, showing teeth in a flash, then Will pursed his lips. “I…” The smile widened again and Hannibal smiled too, sharing. “I was surprised when you didn’t psychoanalyze me to death when I told you I kissed Alana.”

Bowing his head slightly, Hannibal remembered as well. “I did not wish to dwell on it.”

“You seemed preoccupied.”

“Displeased, maybe,” he admitted. “But moreso because of the recent presence of Tobias Budge in my dining room.” He leaned forward, taking Will’s plate. “Your attraction to Alana had its use.”

“It seems all very… distant,” Will said, recalling silently at the thought of these moments, so far away in time and yet so close to him in mind. If he controlled his recollection, instead of the reverse, maybe he could just push them all away.

Hannibal had got up with both empty plates. “I toyed with the idea, at the time.” Will followed him and insisted on meeting his eyes over the kitchen island. “Of killing you in my kitchen, that evening.”

“What stopped you?” Will asked.

Considering answering directly, Hannibal found that the search for the thoughts and the words necessary led him in regions darker and more uncertain than he had first assumed, and he went back on his tracks. “I would have taken the filet knife under the ribs, through the heart. You didn’t have your gun with you.” Hannibal piled the dishes in the sink and turned the water on. “But I refrained from it. My affection for you led me to see your death as an unstable ground, even then.”

Will leaned back against the counter, his posture relaxing. Hannibal shut his eyes and again, in the depths of the immaterial space he figured himself occupying, Will took him down and down, and it felt triumphant and fervent. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“What happened to Budge, really?” Will asked, retrieving his cup from the table.

“Nearly exactly what I told the FBI. This tale was very little altered.”

“So this serenade thing-…”

“Was probably intended for me, yes.”

“How did he know about you?”

Hannibal rolled the sleeves of his sweater as water filled the sink. “He followed me.”

Will arched one eyebrow. “Followed you. That simple.”

“Apparently.” Hannibal opened his hand in a mute shrug. “I had grown somewhat careless, I suppose. Had you not arrived unannounced that evening, I would have killed him then.”

They washed the dishes in silence. Winston came into the kitchen and sat in front of the door that led to the garden outside. Will let him out, then returned by Hannibal’s side, thoughtful.

“You’re not distant. It's everything else than you that's growing paler,” Will said, eventually.

“You miss the density of the world.”

Will exhaled. “I can’t really miss what I never had. I just wonder where it stops.”

Hannibal stared at him. “Do you want it to stop?”

“No,” Will said.


	11. 11.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will asks Hannibal something.
> 
> Takes place about a week after last chapter, ca. 3 months post-TWotL.

_“Do they hurt?” Will asked, one evening. His eyes were set on the armrests of the psychiatrist’s armchair, rather than on his hands or on his wrists._

_Hannibal’s eyes searched the other man’s face for an intention and found none. All in Will was shifting and moving, slides and vanishing traces. “The tissues tighten when the humidity rises. The tendon in the left wrist had to be sewn.”_

_“You must have trouble playing the harpsichord now.”_

_“I have gone back to simpler pieces,” Hannibal agreed. "But the healing is progressing as it should."  
_

_Will got up, walked to the fireplace and Hannibal remained in his seat, waiting, the foreign longing inside twisting into more knots. “Would you rather have killed him yourself? I heard Jack did it,” the younger man asked._

_Hannibal recalled clearly the pressure of the rope on his neck. “I was in no position to do so,” he said. The blood and the chlorine water flowing down his ribs and legs and he felt a mixture of excitement and disappointment because this was Will’s resorting to murder to reach him, and because he had not been there to help it grow. “Would you rather have been in Mr Brown’s place yourself?” he echoed.  
_

_“I would prefer to pull my own fish out of the water.”_

_For a moment, Hannibal took his eyes to the ceiling of his office and different forces tugged at him from the inside. “How much is Jack Crawford involved into this?” he said._

_Will turned to watch him properly, his face was open and his eyes wide the way they were when he lied. “Not at all. Jack wouldn’t step on our side of things.” The light from the flames cast more shadows on Will’s features._

_His heartbeat quickening, Hannibal felt it thump in the scars on his forearms. “True. He would send you instead.”_

 

* * *

 

Hannibal closed the front door behind them. Will took off his shoes as Winston circled his feet. He placed the box down on the ground and hung his coat, slipping the scarf carefully over the hanger. The scar tissue in Will’s cheek hurt more now that spring was coming. Temperature changes got into the tightly woven flesh and sent shivers down his neck.

Winston brought him to the kitchen and pawed the door insistently. Will let him out and watched the dog’s fawn colors jump around among the patches of weed, the tall tree on the left, the wild flowers starting to bloom on the right, and Winston ran after a bird and lost it in the long grass. Will turned around, and found Hannibal pouring them both glasses of wine.

For a moment, Will was motionless, his back to the door, his hands warming in his pockets.

“If I wanted to be your lover, would it be alright?” he asked. His voice was poised. His mind was running underneath.

Hannibal stilled for a short time. “Are you asking me or asking yourself?”

“You,” Will said. Hannibal held out a glass for him, and Will took it.

The wine swirled in Hannibal’s glass as he cradled it, eyes on Will. “I wonder what it would change,” he answered, lifting an eyebrow. He was composed still, but more like the prisoner now.

“Change?” Will said, frowning.

“Desire is a strange object. Often, it doesn’t appear clearly until it has morphed into something else.”

“You do,” – Will’s throat was dry – “desire me.” He took a sip of wine.

“Yes,” Hannibal admitted. “Perhaps it would feel like you elude me more then, than you do now.”

“I don’t believe I’ve ever eluded you, whatever the situation,” Will offered, softly. He moved to stand near him, his back to the counter, while Hannibal stood before the sink. The fading sunlight striped the opposite wall with golden streaks. Will stared down at his wine glass where the light caught its stem, fracturing in colored rays.

Hannibal looked up at him openly and Will wondered how long would the breach remain open on his face, if it could hold on like this forever. It could not. “Elusiveness can be surprising, come from behind, when all is taken for granted,” the other man answered as softly.

“Bodies are temporary, inadequate when they’re alive, right? They’re not art.”

Moving so that they faced each other, Hannibal let his eyes settle on Will’s throat and Will let him look, thinking that it would soften eventually, or maybe not. “I believe I would manage with your body,” Hannibal said, in a low voice. “Have you grown curious?”

“The idea seemed to follow naturally,” Will pondered after a short shrug. “You haven’t thought about it?”

“Every day.”

“I liked kissing you.” Will paused. “I would like kissing you. I can feel your longing,” he phrased carefully.

Lifting his eyes to Will’s, Hannibal asked, “Do you feel its extent?”

“I’m pretty sure, yes. It’s like an abyss, I can just keep staring and staring, all I’ll ever get is more of the same. But it’s…” – he groped for a word – “very well-ordered. Kind of peaceful. You’ve got to keep it that way.”

“Imprisonment had its advantages. It can grant one the opportunity to better know their fathoms.”

Will placed his glass on the counter, his hand splayed flat beside it. “I won’t leave. If the answer is no.”

“It’s not no.”

“You’re wondering about why I’m asking. Stop thinking about what I’m thinking about.”

A ray of light caught Hannibal’s light frown. “Lover is not quite an accurate description. There would be much more between us than sexuality and affection.”

“Is affection a possibility?”

“I believe we are, at this point, _mutatis mutandis_ , affectionate.” The tilt of Hannibal’s head seemed distantly sad, his lips were parted, but not to breathe. “Do you believe it would be so difficult?”

“I’m not expecting anything normal. I don’t do normal. Neither do you.”

“What are you expecting, exactly?”

“I suppose that it wouldn’t be unlike killing, not entirely.”

“We kill a third party,” Hannibal said, brushing a few traces of dust from the sink. “If we were lovers, there would be no one else between us.”

“Are you frightened of that? To get what you want?” Will asked.

“Not frightened.” Hannibal tilted his head back and his eyes were blurred, as he recollected, tending to his own memory. “For a long time now, you have been the center of all significant motions in my life. You were absent and I felt your presence through your influence only. The thought of the opposite situation is unsettling.” He focused on Will again. “Why do you want this?”

“I feel like the discrepancy is getting wider. Between what I feel and what I do. It’s starting to feel like this should exist, here, now.”

Hannibal’s fingers clasped and unclasped the glass’ stem. “What makes you think you have to ask at all?” he asked back.

_“I found you there. Victorious.”_

_Will snorted, leaned his head back against the window. “What game have I won? I don’t feel like I won anything.”_

_“You are victorious. Over me.”_

_“It’s not a game. Don’t reduce it to that.” A light sob came to Will’s voice. “I’m not a game, not to you.”_

_He eyed the book on the bed, besides Will’s leg, where he had drawn, counted and written, watching him sleep, toss and turn, and in his sleep he was running away from him, no doubt. “No, you’re not. Your victory is ancient. You came to the country I lived in, pillaged, ransacked and left, leaving only fire and destruction.”_

_Will’s eyes filled with tears and a difficult smile formed on his lips, and the tears fell down but he did not seem so sad. Hannibal walked to the window. Outside, Chiyoh ran with Mischa under the tallest tree in Will’s garden._

“I’ll tell you if you answer the initial question.”

Hannibal took a moment, his eyes down, then on his wine glass, then on the budding, pale green leaves on the tree outside the window. “Yes, it would. Although, you should know that I am content with the sensuality we have shared. On occasions,” he said, his voice careful and slow. “Your answer.”

Will pursed his lips, his heartbeat everywhere in his body. His voice shook a bit. “You’ve been in love longer than me. It seemed more polite to ask.”

“We were a lot of things. Polite is hardly one of them.”

Drinking down the last of his wine, Will squinted when the sun reached his eyes. “I did expect you to be more forward.”

“Do you not wonder what will happen when I have you whole, Will?”

“It would be as close as you get to eating me.” He paused. “And that didn’t go so well the last time.”

“Then, there would be no one else to consume.” Hannibal finished his wine as well. “The void is a strange thing to contemplate. It devours itself,” he mused, looking at his empty glass.

“There will be no void. I’ll be there. I won’t let you eat me.”

Hannibal gave a small smile. “Sweet thought.”

“Then, I’ll look in your eyes while you do it.” Will ran a hand over his face. “Sometimes, I like to think there’s just time ahead of us. No play, no death. Just days.”

Staring at Will’s profile, Hannibal seemed to consider several possible worlds, then his face became calm and, the answer that he had heard moments before, Will saw it surface on the other man’s features. It was an expression of appeasement on Hannibal’s face, something where future and past mingled together. The last time Will had seen this, they were both covered in Dolarhyde’s blood. “Time does tend to stretch around us,” Hannibal said after a moment, his voice lighter, pleased. “And there was no need for forwardness.”

Arching his eyebrows, Will considered the words. “You weren’t particularly explicit.”

Beside him, Hannibal’s face showed a tiny alteration that looked like gleam. “I could make the argument that it’s not my style.”

Will turned his head fully and waited until Hannibal met his gaze. “Flowers would have been nice.”

The sun was nearly set. The window’s glass shimmered in the coming darkness. Hannibal gave a self-contented smile. “I gave you flowers, Will. In fact, an entire blossoming tree.”

“Those flowers were in the burst ribcage of a dead man.”

“And yet. Flowers.”

For some time, Will kept staring and the final pieces came to a fit inside him, not comfortable, but together. He went to Hannibal’s side and reached out. His fingertips brushed against the soft cashmere of the shirt on his shoulder, then he leaned his palm into it. “I’ll look into the files, put the maps together. Maybe Lounds did find something. If this is going to be a trap-…”

“It is.”

“Then, I’d rather walk into it well-prepared,” Will went on.

The other man kept his eyes on Will’s hand where it touched him. “I’ll join you.” Will nodded and moved away to let Winston back inside. The dog's fur smelled of damp grass, cold mud and wild thyme.

Taking a moment to try and feel if he was changed inside at all, Hannibal found nothing different. A low humming, maybe, at the back of his mind. The now familiar tightening in his right side. Something warmer, where Will had touched him.

He walked into the living room. Will had spread the contents of the box on the table. There were blueprints and plans, several pictures. In some, the bodies were intact. In others, forensic staff was on the scene.

Hannibal observed some pictures of the blood splatters. “It cannot be anything else than a trap, by definition.”

“I know,” Will answered. “I’ll just try and figure out which kind it is.”

“Do you see traces of Jack’s hand in this?”

“No. Jack’s style is more direct. He’s confident in all aspects. When he went to kill you, he just walked into your kitchen. No cavalry, no back-up.”

Hannibal thought to point out that Will was the cavalry Jack had expected. “Jack has lost everything. Eventually, he will opt for darkness instead of light,” he said, instead.

Will retrieved a blueprint and laid it out on the table. “Or he’ll just make more light for himself.” He pointed to sections of the print Hannibal identified as an upper floor. “They’ll have people watching here. And here. Snippers would be my bet.” Will brought his hands to cover his face. “This is bad.”

His eyes leaving the paper and the table, Hannibal considered Will. He did not know what he found the most intriguing: whether he found nothing else in Will than sincerity, at this point, or that he kept searching for other things. “When reduced to its most basic elements, a trap is nothing but an event. If the event doesn’t happen, things are only latent. If it does happen, then finally we know what the event was meant to be.”

“You’re being teleological.”

“Maybe,” Hannibal conceded. Will turned to meet him, moving closer. “The prey is meant for the trap, insofar as the trap doesn’t happen until the prey presents itself.”

Will looked down at the prints, perplexed. “We’ll see for ourselves, I guess.” He paused and closed his eyes. “Why did you wait until I asked?”

“You would have perceived the opposite as influence,” Hannibal said.

“Or as frankness.”

Hannibal ran his fingers over the pictures on the table. One of the oldest bodies was displayed, its broken neck angled on the ground, both arms pinned to the floor, with thick nails between the ulna and the radius. It had been balanced upside down, the legs bent, the right one backward and the left one forward, so that once rigor mortis had set in, the corpse seemed like a frozen contortionist. “So I waited, Will.”

 

* * *

 

_Once Will’s hands were bandaged, Hannibal led Will back to the dining room. Randall Tier’s body was still on the table, pale, stiff, its skin like wax in the dim light. Blood trickled from his ear onto the black polish of the wooden surface beneath. Will could not exactly look at it, Hannibal could tell. The other man’s eyes followed the outline of the corpse. He seemed absorbed, maybe he still felt the resistance of bone under his fists._

_“What will you do?” Will turned his head toward him. He still looked distracted. “With the body,” Hannibal specified._

_“I’ll do it home.”_

_“Do you have all it requires?”_

_Will closed his eyes. Hannibal could see it on his face, the overwhelming thoughts brought on by the practicalities of murder, like a wave coming up. And he saw Will consider it, cold, quiet. “I’ll find a way.” He flexed his most wounded hand. “Besides, I wouldn’t want to dirty your kitchen. First times are messy.”_

_Reaching forward over the table, Hannibal caught the vase that stood there before a slowly expanding puddle of blood reached it and put it away. “What makes you think I use my kitchen?”_

_“I thought meat was meat.”_

_“If all life is meat, then the world is a kitchen.”_

_Will lifted strange eyes up to him. They were part aloof and part shaking. Hannibal stared until he saw, inside, someone holding their knees to their chest and screaming at all the blood they had spilled, and he knew this scream. “Do you do it here? Or do you move them?”_

_He smiled and looked away, but Will caught his eyes. “You’re the profiler, Will.”_

_“Better not to move them,” the younger man said. And he tapped his foot on the dining room floor, firmly enough to hear a tiny echo under the floorboards._

_Hannibal held the gaze. Will's eyes said I know your secret, I know about the empty space where you kill everyone. Hannibal's own answered really, do you?_

_Finally, Will went to the body and leaned forward to tuck Tier’s arm around his neck, scooping the corpse on his shoulder._

_Hannibal contemplated the blood on the table and considered stopping Will and offering him the use of his basement. But he opened the door for him and the young man walked into the night. Hannibal stayed behind, framed in the doorway. “I recommend discarding all your clothes.”_

_Letting the body fall back into the back of the car, Will turned around. “I work forensics. I’ll be fine.”_

_“I also advise not to wait. Once putrefaction begins, the flesh attaches tighter to the bone.”_

_There was a sway in Will and he leaned against the car. “I’ll do it tonight,” he said._


	12. 12.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal receives a visit.
> 
> Happens ca. 4 months post-TWotL.

Weeks went by. Will’s shoulder now allowed him to fish. He found a stream that was nothing like the one in Wolf Trap, nothing like the one near Molly’s house, nothing like him at all. It was more of a small bay, in the loop of a nearby river. A rotten, wooden dock stretched forward in the water, its pillars coated in greens and alguae.

On the third time he went, _Walter waited for him there, already fishing. He was not dressed for it and most of his clothing was wet._ Will stayed away for a few minutes, then he walked in the water too. He knew he should find another place, but for now, it seemed okay.

 

* * *

 

During dinner, Will was silent, thoughts elsewhere. Hannibal watched the shadows surface and bloom on his brow, the way his eyes would not settle, the absent movements of his hand, the opaqueness of his mind.

Eventually, Will placed his fork down. “It’s not us they’re after. It’s Jack Crawford,” he said.

“What makes you so sure?”

“If they wanted to kill us, or one of us, they would have done that today.”

Hannibal closed his lips around the bite of _soufflé_ , swallowed, then placed the tea spoon parallel to the knife. “We do not know yet who they are.”

“Another reason. They’d make sure we know who they are, if they wanted to kill us.” Will’s voice was quiet. The flames from the fireplace drew more shadows to his face, making him seem brighter, younger, an image of himself. “I won’t let them kill Jack. If it comes to that,” he specified, eyes locked with Hannibal’s.

Outside, the night was transparent and clear, crowding against the windows. It was warmer than most evenings. “You think this is my doing, from a distance,” Hannibal said.

Will sighed, tried for a smile, but failed and leaned back into his chair, his fingers curling around the stem of his glass. “It looks like someone wants me to think that.”

 

* * *

 

Hannibal woke up when he heard faint steps down the corridor. There was no further noise until the door opened briefly, then closed. His eyes were still shut and he had his back to the door, but both from ear and smell, he knew who it was.

Will held the doorknob carefully and twisted it slowly, as to be perfectly silent. His naked feet brushed the ground quietly. He took in the small window, its drawn blinds and the moonlight outside, not nearly full, but bright and unreal. Everything shone in deep blues and grays.

He moved forward swiftly and slipped on the bed, stretching over, then beside the other man. Hannibal’s eyes were open now and he stared, mute, motionless, as Will slid under the covers in the narrow space. Hannibal kept to his place in the bed, feeling as if he was still falling.

As he uttered a sound, Will touched two of his fingers to his mouth, light, but resolute.

“May I touch you?” Will asked, whispering because of how close they were.

Hannibal licked his lips. “You already have.”

His right arm was still stiff, but Will moved it capably, until his hand lay flat on Hannibal’s hip. “No. Not like this, no,” Will said.

Hannibal brought his hand between them and Will shut his eyes as fingers traced his chin, his mouth, unhurried now. “I will touch you, as well,” Hannibal assured him.

A light shiver ran through Will. His face cracked into a smile, brief, nervous, other things too, and Hannibal’s fingers felt it. “Yeah. I know.”

“Are you expecting violence?”

“It’s hard not to have it in mind. But no. I guess I’ll just… wait for it.”

Hannibal’s lips found his skin then. They stopped at the side of his face first, caressing, his hand smoothing back Will’s hair. “No teeth, I promise,” Hannibal hushed against his ear.

Then Will brought their faces close. “I need to know I can do this to you,” he mouthed, the words lower than the sound of their breathing. They pressed together, and everytime Will breathed out, his chest expanded into Hannibal’s.

“There’s a point where it’s hard to know who does what to whom,” Hannibal said, his hand flat on Will’s chest, measuring its breathing, feeling the warmth and the closeness and the skin, the skin he wished he would tear and eat, possess, transform. And he stopped thinking of anything but the warmth, and how strange it was, in fact, that it would come from Will. He arched up and kissed him, then.

Hannibal’s head sank in the pillow, Will’s nose into his cheek, his legs on either sides of him. Will sat up above him, the blankets sliding down his back, he pulled his t-shirt off. In the dim moonlight, he was all black and white, the healing scar on his cheek a paler curve in his sparse beard, the one on his shoulder shining bright.

 

* * *

 

The curls of Will’s hair touched the crook of his neck. Hannibal placed his hand flat on the wall in front of the bed, stabilizing them. Their eyes were shut and their mouths were open to breathe. Will’s hand joined Hannibal’s, fingers fitting in between his, pale against gray. It was strange, that they would do this in complete darkness, but then they would see each other even with their eyes plucked out in a lightless world.

Will exhaled sharply and his arms tightened around them. Hannibal breathed against his skin. There were only abstract images in his mind, flows of colors and of lines.

 

* * *

 

While Hannibal showered, Will changed the sheets and let Winston in the room. The dog smelled the edge of the bed, nosed the covers a bit, then went to the chair in the corner, sitting by it, watching Will.

The water stopped running and he could see Hannibal in the shadows that his movements cast around in the small, white-tiled room. Echos filled _his head,_ _Hannibal helped him to his feet and inside his Wolf Trap house, deserted. Will could move his legs, but felt almost nothing from the toes to the knees, blinding pain in his thighs and a nauseating sway everytime he put a feet on the ground, and everytime he turned his head, and everytime he looked forward, or upward, or at anything at all. Will collapsed on the bed, thinking the cut to his forehead, and the dent the scalpel had cut in his face would stain the blankets and the pillows._

_But then he figured that he was covered in blood, that Hannibal was covered in blood, that the house was stained with murder and death. He was not aware of Hannibal wrapping him tightly in the coverlet, then getting more blankets and piling them on him until, eventually, the world stopped turning._

_Later, when Hannibal felt for a pulse against his neck, Will’s eyelids flipped open and he remained motionless while Hannibal counted the heartbeats, the light of the diminishing fire making them both appear golden with black shades. After some time, Hannibal pulled his hand back, got up and left the living room._

_Will heard the water running and was dimly surprised the pipes had not frozen shut, but he fell asleep again. In his dream, he walked alone, trying to keep up with Hannibal, who preceded him in a thick forest of short gray trees._

Walking out of the bathroom, Hannibal came to stand in front of the bed, a folded towel between his hands. Will arranged the coverlet and looked at him, until he had to smile and let go of his eyes.

Hannibal’s eyes had not let go of Will’s, and his lips curled slowly. “Are you staying?”

Will nodded. “If it’s fine.”

“Of course,” Hannibal answered, almost silent. Will did not know exactly, if something had disappeared from Hannibal’s face, or if something new had started being there.

 

* * *

 

The spring nights' skies were paler, the air seemed lighter, thinner. Light came up slowly. Between the moment when it was nocturnal and black, and the one when he could make out the off-white of the sheets, the shape of furniture, the form of their limbs under the covers, only a handful of moments had seemed to pass.

“I wonder,” he started. “If we had done this earlier, would less people have died?” He was on his back, his arm draped over his stomach.

Hannibal stiffened somewhat, his eyes were open, he stared at something beyond Will’s shoulder. “I don’t usually consider alternatives.”

Will closed his eyes. “I do it all the time.”

“Do you know why?”

“It’s comforting. It reassures me, makes me think I chose some things.”

Hannibal’s hand lay flat on the bed. He smoothened wrinkles in the sheets. Will’s hand was near, his eyes went to the closeness of their fingers. “Ghosts are not the most comforting figures,” he said.

For a moment, Will did not speak. “I still see Abigail, sometimes.” He paused and turned to look at Hannibal. “Is she in your memory palace?”

“No. She’s gone. She was yours.”

Will’s cheek dug into the pillow. “I don’t imagine you, letting go.”

Morning had come now. Hannibal’s face seemed calmer, his voice far away. “Mischa’s image absorbed hers. Like it did others,” he evoked. “You think often of what could have been different.”

“You keep the possibilities into the past so that they don’t come out,” Will replied.

For a while, Hannibal seemed to ponder the words. When he reached out to stroke Will’s shoulder, the other man shut his eyes. “It is not impossible I will hurt you, again,” Hannibal added.

“You don’t know that.”

A slight smile came to Hannibal’s lips. “Of all the possibilities you invoke-…”

Will leaned against the other man's hand. “I don’t see this one.” His fingers went to cling to the sheet, the same way he had often twirled the hospital coverlet between thumb and finger, feeling the rough edges of its polyester wool, waiting for the ghosts to come back, throat dry, tubes keeping him together. “When I woke up in the hospital, the only thing I wished for was that you had killed me with Abigail. I thought of it so hard, and for so long, that when I went back home, got up, showered and walked the dogs, I felt weird to be alive.” His palm flatened the sheets against his hips and he kept his eyes on it, while Hannibal’s eyes were still on his face, Hannibal’s hand still on his shoulder. “It’s weird in the same way. To think you’d hurt me now.”

Hannibal ran his thumb over the end of Will’s scar, near the clavicle. “What do you see then?”

Against the morning glow, part of Will’s face vanished in a blaze of white, in a ray of sunshine. “Me hurting you,” he whispered.

“Now and ever, you see mostly what you fear.”

“And it’s usually true.”

“I did not know precisely what I would do. That night,” Hannibal said, after a moment.

“It...” Will’s eyes closed, he knew, to stop him from showing too much. “It wasn’t a good night.”

“You were unprecedented,” Hannibal corrected. “You still are.” He had touched Will’s mind, felt it in all its shapes, formed it, then folded it, then collapsed it, then opened its insides, taking them out so Will would see them. But now it seemed far away. “Are you afraid you’ll kill me?” he asked instead, moving closer, his breath on Will’s ear.

“No, I’m not,” Will shook his head, not knowing whether he was not afraid or whether he would not kill. “I’m scared I’ll do worse than that. I’m your weakness.”

Hannibal stopped and breathed, his eyes on the spot of skin where his fingers rested, parallel to the scar. “And myself am yours.”

A small smile was all Will gave, before he caught the other man’s hand in his. “No, you’re my violence. I admit. They’re somewhat the same.”

Eyes on the joint hands on the sheet, Hannibal exhaled. “You shouldn’t worry about killing me,” he said. “I won’t let you.”

 

* * *

 

_As Will exited the hospital elevator, he still heard Dolarhyde’s voice in his hears. Sometimes it was the voice that said he would break his back, sometimes it was the voice that said he would not._

_He entered the room as silently as he could, but the young woman sat up in bed. She had heard the sliding door shushing open. Will wondered how many other things she could hear that he could not even see. “Hello, Reba,” he said._

_“Hello Mr Graham,” she replied, smiling, eyes unfocused, but fixed, stubborn._

_“Will. Please.”_

_She smiled and took her head down, eyes waiting. “Okay. Will.”  
_

_Will moved closer, making sure his steps were audible, he did not want to be more invisible, darker, more entangled, than he already was. “I thought I could come back and see you,” he started. “But some new things have come up. I might be going away. I wanted to tell you.”_

_“He’s alive. I know.”_

_“You’ve been told.” Will sat on the bed._

_“Yeah. I’ve been-…” She untwisted the hospital bracelet on her wrist. “I’ve been wondering if I should be worried. That means I probably should be, right?”_

_Will shook his head and reached out so she felt the weight of his hand near her own. “No. He’s not coming for you.”_

_“What’s he doing then?”_

_“He’s…” Will licked his lips, considered his words, felt the characteristic vertigo of things sliding into their right place. “He’s trying to kill someone. But we know who that is.”_

_She smiled, like she had seen it all already, strong and pure and wounded. “Well. You be careful.”_

 


	13. 13.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will has memories of making jam.
> 
> Set five months post-TWotL.

He first noticed the sheets tucked around him, their light blue and the morning light giving off a soft glow. Hannibal got up and went to the window. It was barely dawn and Will stood outside, partially hidden by the branches of the maple tree. Winston ran wildly, after the birds and among the flowers. The younger man bent down to pick a piece of wood and threw it farther, and Winston started after it and left Will smiling.

Going downstairs, Hannibal stayed in the living room for a moment, to look at Will through the windowpanes of the French doors. In them, the younger man was fractured in many small pieces, yet whole, his image could easily be put together. It took a while for Will to notice him. When he did, he took his head down at the patch of grass at his feet, then back up, and he squinted as the coming sunlight was reflected in the windows. 

The absence of fear had always been staggering in Will. He had hidden it under layers of fright, nightmares and furtive thoughts. Now, every day, Hannibal looked at it in the eyes and the eyes looked back, pale, clear.

He straightened the left sleeve of his shirt and went in the kitchen. On the counter, he placed the crate of strawberries, then reached for the small knife in the drawer.

He heard Winston’s paws against the door first, then the soft noise of claws against the wooden floor, then Will’s steps, and when Will entered the kitchen, he smelled of his dog and of cold, clay-like mud, it had not soaked through his boots, but it still clung to the material of his pants.

Hannibal’s fingers were red from the strawberries’ juice, he pushed the knife down through the fruit, the blade resting against his thumb and cut the stalk and leaves. The hulled fruit joined the others in the pot.

He eyed Will’s fingers, braced on the counter, then the man’s face, watching the fruits between his hands. “There are moments like this that remind me of a past life. But I can’t quite pin it down,” he started, tracking Hannibal’s hands going from the strawberry crate to the pot. “I’ve seen you do this before.”

“You’ve assisted me,” Hannibal clarified.

“I don’t remember it.”

Hannibal placed the knife down and sucked the pad of his thumb, where a red droplet of juice slid. “You were feverish at the time.” Will’s breath huffed quietly from his nose. “What do you remember, from the encephalitis?”

Will turned away, stared at the window and the outside. “A handful of things. The rest, I patched up. It was enough that I was certain, when I started remembering.”

“Do you want me to tell you? Fill in the blanks?”

A slow shake of the head, eyes that remained fixed on the ground, far from them both. “No. I would prefer if some things stayed the way they are, in my head. The blankness is mine.” Will’s face was serene again. “I had this image of you then. There’s something comforting in the idea of not seeing everything.”

“Ignorance is innocence?”

“Sort of. Things were simpler. I woke up, walked the dogs, got headaches, worried about Abigail,” Will said, pausing before saying Abigail’s name. His worries turned out to be true, Hannibal mused. There was some comfort in the idea of our worst fears materializing before us. At least, we were not fools to be afraid. His eyes stayed on the tiny strawberry and he was _on his back, the impact of the bullet only a terrible weight at this moment, and not pain yet, the trauma flooding his body with heat and rapidity, as if blood hurried to pour out of him. Will stayed down at him and drank a sip of wine, Dolarhyde’s eyes on his face did not leave him and Hannibal’s gaze remained on Will, even as he drew his gun and pointed it at him to finish the work Francis had started. And as much as his sister’s body had stayed within him all this time, as much would his death at Will’s hand be their common victory. Death was another form of truth and Will stood amongst golden colors, and the wind blew through the broken window, and the beige carpeting soaked up his blood. The bullet from Will’s gun went through his lungs._

“What makes you think I didn’t implant the idea of love in you, long ago, so it would surface now?” he asked.

For a moment, the movement of Will’s thoughts stopped and he gave the idea credit, but it did not last long. He shook his head, a smile on his lips, not entirely sad, although less quiet. “Love is a complex emotion. And you wanted to earn it. But now I know you’ve thought about it.”

“I have.”

“Myriam Lass-ing me?”

Watching Will shift on his feet, Hannibal moved his eyes upward to find his. “It wasn’t a suitable idea.”

Will’s uncertainty was like the subtle motions in a boiling liquid, until suddenly it focused on its object and evaporated. On Will’s face, it showed in the eyes that would not let go. “You earned it.”

It was a moment before Hannibal dropped his gaze. On the ground, Winston was sitting down, a few feet away from the counter, jaw closed, calm, steady, protective. Hannibal recalled how Will used to think he was no longer eligible to his dogs’ simple affection.

“All of them?” Will asked, pointing at the fruits, basked in light on the white countertop.

Hannibal nodded and Will walked around the island, took a knife to hull strawberries with him.

 

* * *

 

_Their kitchen had enough space in the middle to fit a table with six seats. The floor was tiled with linoleum squares. It curled at the edge near the door that led to the porch. Will reminded himself to nail it down. There was a large pot on the oven and Molly was washing a knife and a measuring cup in the sink. The smell was what triggered the memory in Will. Hannibal Lecter standing in his kitchen on a Saturday, apron around his waist. The clouds and the softly falling snow outside. The pictures of Beth Lebeau’s skin in the file in his bag. Then a big black hole and, at the bottom, the smell of sugar and fruit pectin._

_“You slept okay?” she asked._

_And he shook out of it. “Yeah. Yes. Jam smells good.”_

_She smiled and dried the plastic cup, her eyes down, trusting, and Will felt the shadow again, that she should not trust him. One day, death would come into their lives and he did not know what he would do. “Jackie texted me a couple minutes ago. They’ll be here around 3.” She kept smiling, but the stillness of it asked a question. “You’re sure you don’t mind?”_

_And Hannibal Lecter smiled in his kitchen. And Will shook his head and smiled, warm, capable, radiating. “Of course not. It’ll be nice putting faces on the names I’ve been hearing.”_

_“Just don’t tell Mike what I said about Obama the other day,” she smirked._

_Will moved to her, touched their foreheads and ran the back of his hands against her arms and it was a much more courteous voice than his own that spoke inside his head. “I’ll follow your lead in conversation. As in all things.” She closed her eyes and their noses brushed. “I’m sure they’re lovely,” Will went on._

_When he went to the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth, he stared at himself in the mirror. He knew he could not see it, not physically, but he could not stop looking. His face seemed more harmonious, composed and quiet. He smiled at himself in the mirror and Hannibal asked a soft question at the back of his mind. How’s the normal life, Will?_

_Leaning over the sink, Will received the question with some peace, and some rage too, that he had paced through and through, until it had been reduced to atomic components, positives and negatives, leaving a sort of shiny dust in the corners of his mind. He had become the monster in plain sight, the open, honest man who said the truth to every one, helped and counselled. Hannibal Lecter had grown in him from within, almost of its own accord._

_Will showered and the feeling did not leave. After, he walked back to the kitchen. Molly stewed the jam with a wooden spoon. Apricot. Will told her that it would be better to let it caramelize at the bottom, that way the pectin would thicken faster. If it burned, there might even be a slight smoky taste. It would be great._

 

* * *

 

It took almost two pounds of sugar to cover the strawberries. It formed a small white mountain over the pot’s edge. Hannibal’s eyes searched the differents tones of white, some sparkling, some not. Eventually, at the outer limit, red bubbles came up. He evened the pile of sugar and turned his back to the pot, moving to place the strawberry stalks in the colander to rinse them. Then, he would boil them, and the resulting light syrup would be added to white wine, vodka and a touch of ginger.

He found Will observing him, avoiding to settle precisely on his eyes, but coming near, touching his neck, his shoulders. Then the younger man frowned and Hannibal felt his slowly sprouting amusement. “Do you like killing better?” Hannibal blinked, then stared at Will until he did make eye contact. “What?” Will asked. His smile was gone, but his features were still softened.

“Is an answer really necessary? You’re just asking to see the look on my face.”

And Will’s lips widened in what was almost a laugh. “It’s working.”

Hannibal smiled back graciously. “Nor sex, nor murder compare to the pleasure that eating you would be.”

Almost a full minute passed. Hannibal observed the clouds gather in Will’s mind, obscuring his eyes. Then Will’s smile disappeared entirely, his thoughts had enveloped him. “This. This kind of sweetness. It’ll be horrible the next time we do try to kill each other.”

His hands stilled over the colander in the sink, Hannibal’s voice quietened. The air had been so light. “What makes you think it would occur to us again?” he asked.

Will went on. “All of this will become hurt.”

“Regrets, Will?” Hannibal prompted. And the other man shook his head, gave a nervous smile and blinked away, eyes to the ground. Hannibal moved forward and closer. “Then stay here now. Don’t look ahead. Don’t look down at the sea as you stand by the cliff.”

“I can’t look down at the sea, I’ve drowned in it a long time ago,” he whispered, his head tilted away. The heel of his hand caught the tear rolling down his cheek, onto the healed scar. Hannibal lifted his hand to catch his wrist, and the sweet smell of the strawberry jam was clogged in his memory with this moment, and the cell phone buzzed on the table near the entrance to the living room, and Hannibal’s forming recollection dissolved. A faint, incomplete sorrow gripped it and did not let go.

In a few steps, Will had gone to the phone. He answered curtly and frowned. “Only Jack Crawford has this number. What happened, Starling?”

Hannibal turned back to the strawberry jam, Will’s voice drifted away. Before the door, Winston waited, spots of sunlight on his fur. Hannibal had believed that entropy had expanded to its maximum point already and ruptured. He had been played and chaos had been running under their feet all this time.

 

* * *

 

The hospital room was somewhat dark. There were only the short blueish neons over Jack’s bed. His skin looked grey, the tape that held the central line to his neck was a sharp white, and Clarice Starling closed the door behind him. Will slipped the hood off and Jack Crawford’s eyes did not leave him. They had not been this close in the last five months. They did not greet each other and Will had not expected anything. He thought for a while before he spoke. “Did you see who it was?” he asked, finally.

Jack eyed him. He seemed taller, bundled in the pale blankets of the hospital bed, than Will remembered him. “No.” His voice was a croak. “It was pitch black in there, I couldn’t even get back at them.”

“Them?” Will pressed. “Who?”

“It was too fast. It could have been just one person.”

Will slipped off his glasses and sat by the bed. “No prints, anything?” he asked, loud enough this time so that Starling also heard.

Stiffening, Jack looked at Starling. She was by the door, keeping Will inside, protecting Jack. At least half of Jack’s mind was not excluding that Hannibal had done this. “Why are you here?” the wounded man asked at last.

“I don’t want you to die,” Will answered. And he knew that now it sounded like a threat.

“I won’t. This was a message.”

Will shook his head. His folded glasses hung from the collar of his hooded sweater, the lenses reflected the light and the reflection was a tiny speck in Jack’s scleras. “They’ll come back for you. Then, they’ll follow Hannibal’s path and check the boxes. Alana, Margot, Miriam, Bedelia, Frederick Chilton,” Will listed.

Jack’s eyes did not leave the ceiling for a moment. Will looked at the covers. Starling had told him the wound was in his thigh, it had severed his femoral artery. “I realize I didn’t ask personal questions often,” Jack said, finally.

Managing a small smile, Will exhaled slowly. “It didn’t matter, Jack. It still doesn’t,” he replied, as softly as he could, exonerating. There was nothing you could have done, except not be there, except not be you.

Staring over Will’s shoulder at the young woman by the door, Jack asked. “You and Hannibal. How long has it been going on?”

“You were there when I met him.”

“Don’t play dumb. How long has it been personal?”

Will got up from the bed, smoothened his pant leg and he knew what it looked like, less like him and more like someone else. “It’s never been personal. It’s always been rather universal. Now, it’s just… more detailed knowledge.”

Jack’s eyes closed briefly. “You could have used it. If he loves you, you could still use it,” he offered. It sounded insane, and Jack still thought there was something he had known in Will, but he had not wanted to know. And there was nothing left for the world to see now.

“He does love me. And I have used it.”

“To do what?”

Starling was far from the light, a bit into the darkness. Will turned to stare at her for a time. He wondered if this was her idea, or Prurnell’s. “Really?” He arched his eyebrows. “A fuck-and-kill plan?”

Breathing evenly but audibly, Jack straightened in bed. “When did his death stop being an option?”

There was a small window in the room and Will looked at the blinds that were closed over it, searching for an escape and finding none. “When you stopped me from doing it, the first time,” he said, memories bubbling. _Abigail’s blood on the floor, Hannibal waking him in the car, unafraid, openly fascinated, the Hobbs house, a ghost in itself,_ and Will had pressed the trigger. It was the only time he had transparently wanted Hannibal Lecter dead. “That bullet was going in his head. After that, there was nothing left for me to do.”

“Do you love him?”

Will tilted his head to the side, slowly cracking the articulation of his jaw, on the right side, where it always seemed stuck. “I tried to find a way around it, for a long while,” he whispered.

Jack’s eyes stayed on him. Will did not take his own back up. “We found a handprint. We couldn’t pull a fingerprint from it, but it’s small. A very young man or a woman,” Jack explained.

 

* * *

 

Looking up, Hannibal watched Will come in, Winston following him closely. The younger man stood in the doorway, his hands in his pocket. “I remembered in the car. You were making blueberry and plum jam. I came to ask you about the pictures of Beth Lebeau’s skin.”

Hannibal put the tablet away and recalled the moment. It had the strange, devouring tone of a past hope. “You seemed lucid. Usually, I could not tell if you were dissociating or not.”

“You were the only one who I thought understood.”

“I did.” Winston sat down at Will’s feet and the younger man looked away. “You peeled the plums. You told me-…” Hannibal started.

“I’ll remember on my own.”

Hannibal observed a spot on his leg, near his knee. He possessed a part of Will and slowly Will would come to share it again. Now it existed between them, floating, shapeless. “What has Jack Crawford learned?”

“There was a handprint, a small hand. They found it on his jacket.” Will came closer. “He also wanted to talk a bit.”

“About you?”

Will quirked his eyebrows in the affirmative. “And you.”

Rising from his seat, Hannibal made his way to Will. He placed the palm of his hand flat on Will’s arm and felt the flesh under the shirt, the skin and the muscles and the living heat. The younger man closed his eyes and his head tipped down, as if he listened to something inside his own chest. “Did you tell him the truth?” Hannibal said.

Will’s hand found Hannibal’s other hand and he heard his own tranquil intakes of breath. “Some of it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'd like to extend the warmest, most beautifully fluffy thanks to everyone who's been reading these quiet, sometimes uneventful words. It's both amazing and strange how AO3 puts numbers on this. And so, whenever I think that around 200 pairs of eyes have seen each chapter and that over 100 of you left kudos and comments, it makes me feel like a less lonely blip in the universe. 
> 
> I've talked about it a bit in the notes in the first chapter and in the comments: there's a bigger, plot-focused story surrounding this. It's being written. Once it's complete and edited, I'll see about posting it.


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